 Good afternoon. Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Peter Bergen, the Director of National Security Studies. We had 160 people show up, and quite a lot of people have managed to brave the rain, so we thank you for that. It's my privilege to introduce Steve Cole, who is the President of the New America Foundation. He just finished his seventh book yesterday. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes in explanatory journalism and also non-fiction, and a finalist in biography. The author of Ghost Wars, which many of you will have read, and also the Bin Laden's. And Steve has been reporting on South Asia since the early 90s. In fact, I remember pieces that Steve had written in 1993, thinking how great they were at the time, and they still hold up very well today. And Susan Glasser, a frequent collaborator of ours, the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy Magazine, the author of Kremlin Risings. Susan has reported on every aspect of the war on terror. She did a piece about the Battle of Tara Bora, which I think really was the definitive take of the times in 2002 about what really happened there. She was also the national editor of the Washington Post, editing many of these stories as they came out over the past decade. And so what we thought we would do today is have a conversation between ourselves for half an hour, in which Susan would be sort of both moderator and participant, and talk about kind of where we are 10 years later. I just wanted to throw out a few quick ideas. I think it would have been unpredictable that only 17 Americans would have died in jihadi terrorist attacks since 9-11 in the past decade if we'd had this conversation, say, a year after 9-11. I think it would have been unpredictable that not a single jihadi terrorist would have engaged in a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear materials attack in the United States since 9-11. I think it would have been unpredictable that it would take 10 years to have found bin Laden. I think it would have been unpredictable that we'd still be in Afghanistan. I'm planning to be there past 2014. I think it would have been unpredictable that we're still in Iraq. I think it would be unpredictable that an anti-war president would be now engaging in wars in at least five Muslim countries, by my count maybe six if you include Somalia, so Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. So there are many things that are sort of surprising. And I guess one quick question to both of you. Is there anything that isn't surprising? You know, I think it's a great question and I'm hoping Steve will jump in. You started speaking. Well, I was going to start and say thank you to both of you for having us. I mean, to the extent that we've all for the last 10 years been engaged in a process of learning about South Asia and the consequences and the follow on effects from September 11, they've been all of our teachers in having been engaged with this subject deeply before September 11 then in a personal level been my teacher as well. So it's great to be able to have this conversation. You know, I think Steve Call who was at the time the managing editor of the Washington Post, you know, I knew he really had credibility on this subject when he dispatched me from Moscow to Central Asia and he said your mission is to get connected with General Dostum. And you've got to be the first person to land an interview with General Dostum after the attack. And you did. And I did. And I walked around Tashkent, Uzbekistan for literally three days and I kept, there were several other reporters there and they were doing whatever they're doing. I said, but you don't understand. I don't really know who this guy is, but I've got to get an interview with this General Dostum guy and took three translators and multiple satellite phones before I had my brief conversation, if it was actually him, you know, where he described his horseback campaign against the Taliban. But, you know, the point is that both Peter and Steve, you know, really have been immersed in this subject. And actually, I'm glad you asked the question about what is it maybe that was predictable that came out here because in a different way, that's what I was going to suggest is the question. You both were deeply immersed in the pre-story, the story before September 11th of, you know, both the rise of al-Qaeda, its merger and intertwining with the Taliban, you know, the deep dysfunctions of Pakistan, the legacy of our own engagement there. You know, the subject of Steve's book, Peter was the person who had the first interview with bin Laden. You know, looking back on it now, I can say, you know, there were many things, not only on Peter's list, but, you know, many more that I was completely, you know, astounded and befuddled by over the last decade. The disastrous American on the ground engagement, you know, in Afghanistan, while perhaps we didn't fully anticipate it on some level is also not completely surprising or unpredictable. If you look at the broad sweep of history, and as we were just talking before here, because I was based in Russia at the time, I went back and spoke with several of the Soviet generals who had led the military campaign in Afghanistan, disastrously, of course, in the 1980s, including Boris Gromov, who was the last Soviet commander in Afghanistan. He's the guy who famously walked across the Friendship Bridge in 1989 to end the Soviet involvement there. And what he said on September 17, 2001 was, if any American ground troops set foot on the ground in Afghanistan, it will be a disaster for the United States. And at the time, of course, it sort of, this was just so wildly against our thinking. It sort of disappeared and sank without a stone, you know, that story and that warning. But, you know, certainly if you're paying attention, I think it was out there to be known. Well, I think the Soviets were influential, actually, in some of Rumsfeld's thinking and some of the others in the fall of 2001, that whole idea of the light footprint and the idea that it was important not to deploy in Pashtun areas because you would provoke a revolt, and I think they were actually fighting the last war a little bit and I don't think it always served them well, myself, especially in the first couple of years. It's a little bit hard to do the thought experiment because Iraq so distorts what happens. I mean, really, by the time you get to 2002, it's the controlling event in American military strategy and it has impact in Afghanistan as well. But when you look back on those choices that culminated at Torobora with the relatively limited direct options to co-op that hillside and you were, you know, down in Nangarhar talking to the unreliable militias that were the instrument of the ground operation at Torobora. But you go back to it and there was, I'm not suggesting it was irrational but there was a reading of Soviet experience which essentially, I think we can whatever diagnosis of the many mistakes that NATO and the United States have made in Afghanistan since 9-11 they are not the same mistakes that the Soviet Union made, in my opinion. The Soviet Union was proceeding from a completely different and much more illegitimate position from the beginning and the result was that as soon as they came in and tried to impose a revolution on the country they had a revolt and it was the revolt that informed their thinking about the war from the very beginning whereas the American revolt took much longer to unfold. It took many more mistakes and more years to create the kind of ground for Taliban resurgence and the kind of failure of the Afghan government to take hold. The Soviets had that happen to them right away. And then of course British experience was similar. They would march through these same territories and provoke risings on a fairly predictable basis. And I think that plus the American experience during the 80s led a lot of advisers to the Bush administration in the fall of 2001 to say you really cannot afford to repeat these errors and so a whole series of decisions about the extent of engagement were made and they had real consequences over the next couple of years. Yeah, I mean, Milt Bearden wrote a piece in the fall of 2001 which I think was quite influential on foreign affairs. I think it was the title of the graveyard of empires making that argument. And clearly if you look at General Francis autobiography and Rumsfeld's biography these ideas weighed very heavily on them but it was completely a miss. It was the wrong lessons. I mean if you think about what the Soviets did in Afghanistan every principle of successful counterinsurgency warfare they essentially reversed. It was a conscript army that was looting routinely. They were very heavy drug and alcohol problems. They inflicted a totalitarian war on the population and as Steve said they faced a country-wide insurrection. It wasn't just rural pastures. It was every class. Look at Dr. Abdiller, he's a surgeon from Kabul, an eye surgeon. He joined the insurgency in his early 20s and so it certainly was the wrong lesson and the size of the insurgency was very different. If you look at Mark Urban's very good account of the early war there's 175 Afghans on the battlefield at any given moment versus the 35,000 Taliban that there are today if you're being generous. So it was the wrong analogy and it produced these very bad policy outcomes. I remember tracking down Tommy Franks at the convention I think in 04 when we were still at the post and he was bringing his book out at that time and we interviewed him and this question had arisen. I think Kerry had raised it as a criticism of the president and the White House had deflected it to Franks. He was the commander-in-chief and he was responsible for it. So I asked him why did you not... Because one of the questions was why didn't you send the 10th Mountain Division in? They were trained. They were altitude fighters. They were in position. The airlift might have been tricky but that's what they were trained to do to block either the back of the mountain or to join the assault directly on Bin Laden at Torbora. And as I recall what he said, he said that he feared not on the basis of direct experience because he would have not had any. He would have been on the basis of advice that if he put men into those mountains given the demography of that area he would provoke a Pashtun rising and that they would be like Black Hawk down or that they would be helpless to defend themselves which I think was in this reading. Well, I mean that's right. We often talk about the sort of late footprint. What did that mean in reality at Torbora as Peter and I have often joked but it's true unfortunately. There were more American journalists boots on the ground in Torbora than there were American military boots on the ground. Coming back to Washington, oh you covered the battle of Torbora so who did you deal with in U.S. military? I said I never saw an American military figure in Afghanistan until March of 2002 during the battle of Shahiko. That was the first time that I ever encountered any American military person. I did see from a distance British special forces who were acting as spotters for one group of the militia at Torbora and I was pushed into a ditch with Geraldo Rivera but that's as close as I can say. It really was a light footprint. Another data point, by the time the battle of Torbora had happened more journalists had died in Afghanistan with American soldiers. The first journalist to die of course was Johnny Spann who was killed in the Mazda Sharif uprising but the four journalists were killed on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul. So what do we make of the fact that here we are ten years later and we're talking and running articles today on the AFPAC channel which is our joint venture between ForeignPolicy.com and the New America Foundation on Mullah Omar. Still in charge of the Taliban, we're still talking about the Taliban ten years later. We're still talking about its connections with possibly reinventing itself al-Qaeda. That's got to rank as one of the big surprises. Sort of a butch Cassidy story for a new era. Well and I think going back to that fall of 2001 where people who had been around the Civil War in the 90s had advice for the Americans going into Afghanistan after the 9-11 attacks if the advice about Afghan public opinion and Afghan resilience in the face of an international intervention after the Taliban rule was wrong, the advice about Pakistani equities in the post-9-11 settlements in Afghanistan turned out to be right because what's happened is that the United States failed adequately to account for Pakistan's historical hedging strategies in Afghanistan which they had themselves participated in throughout the 1980s. And among the unintended consequences of the Iraq war was the decision to essentially outsource Pakistan's role in the region to Pervez Mishara who was really a figure of continuity in the Pakistan army and whose use of Mullah Omar and the Taliban really didn't differ from predecessors or for that matter from successors. But I think the Bush administration, for lack of resources, attention span and strategy to do something different, decided just to rely on the Pakistan army as an instrument of its political strategy in the region. That was the same mistake that the United States made in the 1980s. You know, you look back on the 1980s and you say, well, what were the unforced errors that the United States made in the 1980s? Because look, I mean, we're not responsible for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or Afghan resistance to that invasion. But what could the United States have done to forge a more stable Afghanistan during that conflict? And one of them would have been to challenge the Pakistan armies' hegemony over political strategy in the war which favored radical Islamists like Gulbadeen Haqmadiar and others who ended up creating the ground on which Al Qaeda was incubated. And the reason the United States didn't challenge Pakistan army's sort of primacy and political strategy in the 1980s really weren't much different than in the 2000s. It was convenient. They were willing to do it. They had a preference to do it. And so we end up with the same cycle. Do you think that there was an alternate course available in 2001 and 2002, in particular with Pakistan? Well, it's not so much the Pakistan army, but it would have been the management of the political transition in the south and east and the management of the Taliban after their overthrow. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see that there were many sections of the Kandahari Taliban that were on the fence as Karzai went into Kandahar. And in researching the sort of narrative of Taliban revival, you certainly encounter many credible regional Taliban leaders who, the most vivid story, the one that's easiest to tell, though maybe too good to check, but it has a couple of sources of testimony to it, was that there was a gathering of regional Taliban leaders on the outskirts of Kandahar after Karzai went in with U.S. Special Forces, took the city in December of 2001, and essentially the meeting was to decide in effect their surrender policy or their reintegration strategy. And somebody raised their hand and said, asked a question of the assembled Taliban leaders. Well, after we become part of the Karzai government, as ex-ministers, will we be entitled to car allowances? Like this was the most normal thing in Afghan politics. You just kind of flip over, you become part of the new government, and instead we installed in Kandahar, in part because of the light footprint strategy, because we were basically a bunch of warlords who had a predatory attitude toward all the Taliban who had thrown them all out and chased them down and sold them for bounty to send them to Guantanamo. And you started a pattern in which there was no, everybody was lumped into the same category. Taliban leadership, Taliban middle level, Taliban local kind of accidental guerrilla commanders, and that policy, which was not discriminating enough in the first place, was given over to proxy warlords whose outlook was not discriminating at all. That's right. And then just to go back to Pakistan for a second, I want to get your views on that as well, because I think on the one hand, you sketched out the reasons that were very similar in the 1980s and in the immediate aftermath of 2001. We have a built-in partner in the Pakistani security establishment. They have the relationships. But what I find so extraordinary is that having A, gone through that experience in the 1980s, this is with the Pakistani establishment pretty explicitly over those first few months of American engagement in 2001, continuing to play both sides in a way that was very transparent and available to anyone, you know, both journalists and also senior American policymakers. I mean, you know, I cannot forget the scene of visiting the family of a Pakistani martyr who was killed in the battle for Mazar Isharif. You know, you could just drive around, you know, within 20 minutes, a half an hour of Islamabad and find, you know, literally hundreds and hundreds of families that had sent their sons off to the war in the aftermath of September 11th in Afghanistan. The government of Pakistan knew for a while this was happening. They were facilitating the return of as many of them as they could once the Americans were seen. So it wasn't like, well, gee, you know, we have this built-in reliable partner. I mean, they had this... Well, you know, in the United States, I mean, Peter, you should jump in on the one hand. But I'll just try this once. I mean, obviously the United States was credulous about Mazar Isharif and the Pakistan Army. Many of the folks in the Bush administration's first-term cabinet, even the ones who had some personal experience of Pakistan, which were very few as a percentage of the cabinet. I mean, this was a cabinet full of mostly men who would have been equipped to deal with a crisis in the former Soviet Union or the Middle East or maybe even Japan or China. But South Asia was a fairly obscure specialty before 9-11. And the cabinet basically had a few people like Armitage and Colin Powell, whose entire experience of the region was in liaison with the Pakistan Army. So they... And they regarded the Pakistan Army correctly as a relatively professional, cohesive army, surprisingly cohesive given the political economy in which it was set. They found it as a useful partner in the First Gulf War. So they went back to it and said, you're going to be our instrument. You're going to be our partner. And obviously there was a great deal of credulousness or a failure to look seriously at how the Army regarded its own interests. We don't have to be sort of moralistic about this. The Pakistan Army had a view of its interests in its neighborhood that was different than the one the United States wished it to have. And because that was inconvenient, the United States looked past that problem and then over-invested in the personality of Musharraf, who after all seems so secular and could speak a good game and made a lot of promises. And as you say, it didn't really require deep investigation to see that there was a duality in the way the Pakistan Army managed its relationship with the United States. It said what it needed to say to the United States and then it managed its own interests as quietly as it could. Now, the problem really, even today after May, after Abadabad, is that when we discovered that the Pakistan Army regarded its own interests in a way differently than we would wish it to, we got really angry. And now we've over-learned the lesson on the other side, you know, as if really by being shocked at our own inability to see what was obvious, now we're going to construct a policy that's based on sort of firmness in the other direction. It's part of this pendulum in U.S.-Pakistan relations over 40 or 50 years that is really quite unhealthy on both sides, but self-defeating for the United States, above all. Yeah, so that takes us right to the present day and American-Pakistani relations. Do you think this is sort of cursed by history to be in the place that it is right now? Obviously, I think we have a 12% favorable rating in Pakistan right now, which is down from 17%, so it's the lowest it's ever been. But we've usually been below 20, so it's one of the most anti-American countries in the world and has been so for a long time. In practice, does that make a big difference to what goes on on the CT front we saw on Friday that Mauritani was arrested in a joint U.S.-Pakistani operation? I think of the sort of elite level as a kind of understanding that we as marriage have better succeed because for all sorts of obvious reasons. Certainly in Congress on the Hill, there's a lot of opposition to the relationship and the desire to cut aid. And certainly in Pakistan, I think I was just in Pakistan in July, I was at the National Defense University and I was the designated pinata for about half a day for basically a laundry list of anti-American complaints that stretch back a very long way. I mean, and just in terms of what Steve said, I think the idea that we should understand somebody's strategic interest better than they do is crazy. And this has been really our problem, is that we think that actually if only they understood their real strategic interests, that they would finally change their policies in a way that would make sense. But I think people understand their own strategic interests better than anybody else. And I think if you've lost three and a half or drawn three and a half wars with your neighbor, that's going to continue. If we'd lost three and a half wars with Canada over the last 60 years or drawn, I think we'd be pretty preoccupied by Canada. So they're not going to change their strategic interests and I think the enemy of the perfect is not the regionally okay. I think that at the end of the day, the operations in southern Waziristan and SWAT were, you know, they weren't, you know, predictable in 2003 if we'd have this conversation and say that there'd be major Pakistani military operations, quite successful ones, against the Taliban and SWAT and south Waziristan, that was not something that would have been predictable. So for all the sort of stern and drang about our relationship with Pakistan, there are a lot of kind of underlying strengths in the society which I think get lost in all this. One is we're probably going to see the first civilian government in Pakistani history complete his term. Two, there's a very independent press. There's a relatively independent judiciary. They had their Arab Spring. Before the Arab Spring was even a thought in the Middle East. They got rid of the Middle Greek tater. I mean, there's Anatole Levin, who's a fellow here, has written a book on Pakistan that kind of explains that there are sort of hidden strengths in Pakistani society that keep this thing afloat, whether it's remittances or the ethnic and tribal structure. And so, you know, probably Pakistan will continue to muddle through. Their economic problems are serious. And that might force a sort of, the problem is there's never been a big enough crisis for Pakistan to really put its house in order. Because just, there's always, you know, something comes along that saves them, whether it's an IMF bailout or whatever. But, you know, the relationship can only get better. So let me try to ask you a question, Susan, and kind of pull us out of South Asia. But because I was thinking about, as the editor of Foreign Policy, there was a pretty good, there have been a whole series of pretty good arguments about 9-11 over the last couple of weeks in different places. And one that really I found most provocative was by Philip Stevens in the Financial Times. And he essentially argued that 9-11 didn't matter. Because if you really step back from an American perspective, certainly from a global perspective, he asked, you know, what happened in the last 10 years that anyone's going to remember in a large way? He would say, rise of China, rise of the rest, decline of relative American power, and rise of middle classes all over those India, China, Brazil, elsewhere. And that this would have happened anyway. And that it basically also created the environment in which the financial crisis occurred because of the global imbalances that led to the American housing boom and bust. And so really, if we were to think about these 10 years, apart from the victims and participants in the conflicts that were generated by 9-11, it was a sidebar. Yeah, no, it's interesting you raised that. That's of all of the 9-11 coverage that we've had on our site and everyone else has. We ran a piece that was very similar, sort of a list of here's 10 things that are more significant than September 11 that have happened in the last decade. And the rise of China, the rise of the rest, and middle classes, the emergence of social networking and sort of technological wiring of globalization were on that list. And if you take the really long view, it's actually hard to argue that point. At the same time that the war on terror was being launched by the United States, you were literally having the largest emergence from poverty into the middle class in the history of the world in terms of numbers of people in a short time span. It's pretty hard to argue with that in a big picture view. The most persuasive case about why it matters is also on some level the most depressing, which is looking at in the context of a sort of late imperial overstretch, and that to the extent that it would merit its own chapter in history books, 50 or 100 years from now, it certainly seems plausible that it could be in that chapter. One thing I've always been struck by is, and this gets to your point about RAC, and that we do end up having to look at these events together, the astonishing and extraordinary growth of the American military budget over the course of that 10 years to fight those wars, and the fact that we are left at the end of this decade with U.S. military expenditures constituting something like, I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but something like 46% of all global military expenditures is just astonishing, right? And that is a growth that might be an anticipated consequence, right? That's what big bureaucracies do when faced with a shattering event like September 11th. They find a lot of reasons to grow their turf, but that strikes me as something that may well last with us, even if it's not more important than the sort of China's economic explosion. I was thinking about that this morning in anticipation of this, because I agree with the kind of late imperial overstretch sort of framing, 9-11 might have provoked an extension of something that was building up anyway, but it's interesting to ask, I mean, maybe this is a little bit twisted of a logic chain, but was the Iraq War really provoked by 9-11? Or was it inevitable that the West, including Tony Blair and the United States, overinterpret their position in the world and overstretch the potential of expeditionary land armies somewhere for some reason? I mean, essentially, you had, why did the United States believe that the costs of invading Iraq would be so low? How did it make such a terrible miscalculation? The first Gulf War, the immaculate intervention against Serbia over Kosovo, various other painless interventions in Sierra Leone by the British Army, the sort of sense that the world melts away before this expeditionary technological power, the intervention against the Taliban, which was also another immaculate intervention, and so even without 9-11, wouldn't the United States have had to learn the hard lessons that we thought we had learned in Vietnam, that there are limits to conventional military superiority, especially in the age of globalization and nationalism, and that you simply cannot accomplish what some of these interventions suggested in all settings at all times, and so you ought to be very careful about undertaking them. Well, and this gets to the war on terror framing and context in which that Iraq invasion occurred, right? This is something you and I were talking about. I think on the imperial overstretch, you could make a kind of counter-argument. You could say that there was actually a giant Keynesian pump for the American economy, in fact, because I mean, there's this kind of narrative that Al Qaeda has this diabolically clever plan to rob us economically, but in fact, there's a lot of failures, in fact, and also Al Qaeda members generally aren't economists, and in fact, it's not an accident that five out of the ten richest counties in the United States surround this city, and just as World War II was a giant sort of Keynesian pump, and so was Vietnam, but in terms of the war framing, I mean, just as a matter of percentage of GDP that we spent on our military, we're only spending 4.5% now, and we're only spending 1% in Afghanistan, even despite the huge amount of money we are spending. In Vietnam, in 1968, we spent 9%, and in World War II, we spent 40%. So, you know, this is a very kind of strange war, in the sense that there's no draft, there's relatively little public expenditure, there's almost no public attention to the war, in a sense, certainly in Afghanistan, it's just people have tuned it out, and I think that as a general proposition, if we, by historical standards, this is not a very significant war of any kind. It's a war that almost destroyed the country. And so I think we will look back on this time as a time of relative peace and probably relative lack of prosperity. But this is not, and so in terms of the war framing, it's a very strange kind of war where there's only 17 Americans who died in the last decade as a result of people motivated by the cityology. Yeah, I think you're right to challenge some of the... I mean, I wasn't actually intending it as an economic overstretch, but just that inevitably we would send an army abroad and fail in the way that we did in Iraq. But I think, you know, on the economic argument, I mean, you know, as Dirksen would have said if he'd still been around a trillion here, a trillion there, eventually it adds up. I mean, you know, if you look at the total sort of consequences of tax cuts, two expeditionary wars, and the financial crisis, then yes, the wars figure only as a, you know, a minority element of the total pain and certainly aren't as significant as the tax cuts. But, you know, they are part of a whole of a sort of sense of America's place in the world. What are America's opportunities? What should be its investments? Where should it be thinking about? Are we correctly perceiving our strategy with an eye on the next 20 or 30 years and the generations that we should be, and are we correctly analyzing the costs and benefits of certain responses to threats? Because there are threats, and there were threats, and even Iraq was a threat. But how do you manage your response to those threats in the context of a correct understanding of your place in the world? And that's the overstretch, I think. You know, that basically the success of the First Gulf War, Kosovo, and even the intervention against the Taliban was so rapidly over and disastrously overlaid. Well, I think, you know, one of the most interesting sort of arguments I've heard surfaced lately in the context of the Arab Spring is that in fact a consequence, not to see this as perhaps the Bush administration might want you to as a sort of like, okay, somewhat delayed from what we want, but ultimately in some way a vindication of our scenario that, you know, democracy once reintroduced to the Middle East will prove to be inexorable. The counter argument to that is a very interesting one, which is that in fact it's our misadventures and our really muddled strategic thinking over the last decade that have postponed. You know, if you see the democratization and the wave of change in the Middle East as the inevitable but very delayed consequence of what should have happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s as part of that third wave of democratization that was occurring elsewhere around the world at the same time. And actually it was the reaction to the heavy handed and sort of misguided application both of American force and the perceived sort of ideological dimension to that in the context of the Middle East that actually delayed the Arab Spring by, you know, a decade or more. I think that's a very interesting and then you begin to see the consequences of a lost generation, for example, of Arab youth who are not only fueling these popular street rivals today in the Middle East but arguably are going to pose a long-term challenge because where our interest may temporarily converge behind these very attractive slogans, it's hard to see that these folks are going to in the long term have a pretty common set of interests with those of the United States in the region. You know, I think that's a really interesting thing and to me, that goes back to this question about the framing of we're launching a global war on terror. Was that A, an inevitable response by an American national security establishment to the sort of shattering terror of September 11th and then B, why is it persisted so long? It's been with us for 10 years. Is it finally over? I thought we had outlawed the war on terror. It was revived and, you know, Obama has made efforts to recast it or to eliminate that branding, so that's the other question. Is it really dead or does it live on? I think President Obama faced an interesting choice when he came into office which was how to frame it and he said, you know, I've never heard him use the phrase war on terror and he framed it as a war on al-Qaeda and its allies which is useful on many levels. Names the enemy, it's not a tactic. Suggests if you dealier yourself from al-Qaeda we're not at war with you. In a sense it was sort of the opposite of saying you're either with us or against us. I mean it would be much more powerful for Bush to say anybody who's against these guys is with us. That would have been much more inclusive and we wouldn't have had some of the problems that we had in the first Bush term. So, you know, he could have, Obama could have said hey it's a global police action against terrorists which is certainly what liberals would have tried at the party and the little democrats would have wanted or certain people in Europe. But, you know, al-Qaeda is a war with us and sort of pretend otherwise would be, I think, naive. And we are in a war. It's not a war with a very exact, I mean Steve and I have had this conversation I think many times in various ways. I mean the problem is the terminology for the war doesn't precisely exist. I mean war is a sort of much too expansive framework but a law enforcement exercise is much too smaller framework and the war against the Babri pirates is perhaps the nearest that we have had in American history that is similar. Do you think that al-Qaeda today, you know, I mean do we have a new set of definitions for what that enemy is whether it's a war or not, you know, casting forward. Clearly they are, we're still engaged in a, you know, sort of struggle against them that it's not solely confined to Pakistan and the borderlands Afghanistan but it obviously has, you know, elements in Africa and that sort of thing. It exists on the internet in a new way. What's your post bin Laden raid view of al-Qaeda now? Well it's always had this characteristic doesn't it? I mean you mentioned those things because you've been working on them for as long as al-Qaeda has been on the radar screen and so it's always been a blended phenomenon very complicated, very hard to draw firm borders around. So it has had a core leadership and aspired to hold a core leadership from the beginning and that's the simplest thing to describe but that's not ever what it's always been. I mean that's never been its entirety. So it's always also been a network of like-minded groups. Now that gets a little bit fuzzy because you have to decide if you're fighting a war against al-Qaeda and its allies, which allies are your enemy and which are are you neutral about and which might you be able to convert to your cause and that as in all wars against coalitions is a dynamic process. So the Libyan Islamic fighting group was on the other side and then became neutral and got flipped and so on. And so the allies today are more important relative to the center because the center has been so badly degraded by U.S. direct action. The allies now have been popping up in places like Yemen and Somalia where they're strengthening themselves. And then you have this other characteristic of al-Qaeda that I'm not sure has a lot of precedent except in the history of terrorism and I'm not sure that even pirates or other things quite have the model of a global move self-described global movement in which leaders incite individuals to act separate from leadership without necessarily any contact with leadership kind of gorillas in place wherever they may be and inspire them to attack certain targets for certain reasons and then claim credit for them. So that idea and the internet is obviously facilitated that aspect of al-Qaeda's sense of itself as a vanguard that stimulate and uprising by individuals who are inspired by the cause and so those things will persist. I'm afraid they'll be around for a long time. They may those characteristics of the way this organization has acted the way it's carried out its violence, the way it's sought funding and recruits we may see that structure adapted by groups with completely different ideologies over time. I don't think, you know, Islamist globalized radicals have a monopoly on really clever media-driven asymmetric strategies. I'm sure we'll find others who will do that whether they'll have the same traction in the world. Another ideology might be more appealing. Maybe. Mark Sageman the great sort of provocative terrorism analyst who's a kid who had like a doctorate at 13 he's just one of those people whose head is not quite large enough to contain his brain and I remember he came over to my house for brunch at some point 2004-2005 and he brought his son who was a young, maybe like 12 and while we were talking about all this sort of thing having the kind of conversation that we're having now he said, oh I'm quite sure my son will be a terrorist my son's sitting there eating like a bagel on the chair he barely looked up, I think his father says this about him all the time and I said, well what do you mean he's obviously not going to become an Islamist radical and he said, no, no, but I'm thinking maybe eco-terrorist that their generation will evolve some view of the harm that powerful interests are doing to the planet or the next generation after his and they will fight back in some guerrilla capacity and then they'll adapt all of hey that's actually a pretty good transition Peter to your database and it was very intended we're about to release a database in the next 24 to 48 hours which will look at forms of political violence in the United States since 9-11 that have got nothing to do with Al Qaeda or bin Laden's ideas and one of the interesting takeaways going to the eco-terrorist Mark Sageman Jr. is that if there is a radiological bomb attack or a chemical or biological it's much more likely to come out of the anarchists or the right wing, there have been five cases that we've documented since 9-11 of people either assembling the materials with a radiological weapon or a chemical or a biological one of course Bruce Ivins his motivations were a little obscure but let's say they were anti-government and anti-journalists since he mailed them to political figures and journalists so certainly the record suggests that there are lots of other forms of political violence, radical vegetarians armed with nuclear weapons or something will alarm us in the future but the I wanted to get to the question of where Al Qaeda is today you know, I mean they're becoming irrelevant and there are Marxists Leninists still somewhere on campuses in Michigan probably or somewhere in the United States but they're just not paying any attention to them and I think one of the really striking takeaways from bin Laden's death was the total absence of protests around the Muslim world where there were, think about the million man protests about the Iraq war in a Jakarta in 2000 before the invasion or in Karachi in Pakistan there were at most a couple of hundred people in Qaeda protested and this is not impressive in a country of 180 million people so I think that the war of ideas was being lost by Al Qaeda long before the Arab Spring, long before the death of bin Laden, these two big events have just accelerated it further there will still be takers for his ideas they're just fewer and fewer Well, so then what do we think about you started us out actually with this question which is, it's extraordinary and are we surprised by the fact that there have been so few acts of Islamic jihadists specifically inspired successful terrorism in the United States in this last ten years do we think there are you know, a whole new wave of sort of follow on Al Qaeda that existed some meaningful way as a threat or did we overinflate the threat from the beginning 9-11 was the climax of Al Qaeda's activities, not the beginning but it was misinterpreted by most of the people in the political class as the beginning of the campaign but it was the end of it in fact and they were very surprised by this event because it didn't fit with our various world views and the kind of people who've been following this in more detail were less surprised we all know who they were so it was kind of a category error and they inflated it into the same Bush was talking about it bracketing it with the fight against fascism and communism which didn't make any sense and if the Cold War had ended with a bang instead of a whimper we would all be not having this conversation so I mean that was you know they mistook it I agree with that except when I think back on that period even with the benefit of all the records of the 9-11 commission and even in the small circle of Dick Clark and few others who basically had all the evidence and had interpreted it correctly it was reasonable in my judgment looking even in hindsight to be uncertain for about six or eight months as to whether or not the cells that had carried out 9-11 had other whether there were other cells of that quality basically you know was this the very best A team that they had and they had hit a moonshot or were there five or six or seven other A teams because after all it had turned out it was fairly easy for them to infiltrate into the United States and sit still without being detected for a long time and there were immediate reports to the president from law enforcement saying you know we're thinking there's probably half a dozen other of these cells now that turned out to be wrong and it took them six or eight months to figure that out now after that then I believe the kind of extrapolation and the category errors and the rest of it are pretty much sustainably unforgivable but I think it took a while to get to that maybe give them a year or whatever you want to do but of course it took much longer than a year for them to then build a gigantic intelligence bureaucracy around you know the maintenance and therefore the popping up of the threat you know which is totally on a different source of momentum coming in so does that mean that right now we're potentially still looking at events in the framework of our own last ten years experience I mean that's what worries me actually is that it's become too easy for us to say well in the prism that again has so much to do with the sort of misconceptions that informed our invasion of Iraq as well I mean it's very hard to have a conversation about this and to separate out our views of Afghanistan from our views of Iraq from our views of the war against Al Qaeda and so you know are we too shaped in how we're thinking of these things because of that particular experience well I mean it could be I mean I think look if you look at the record just look at the patterns and the dots on the last ten years I don't think you can be complacent about the potential threat the potential to miss one or to have a huge consequential surprise I mean there are on that record individuals like Major Hasan who were inspired despite having no contact with trainers to carry out murderous acts on a certain scale but they in our culture and our media saturated culture inevitably they shock the system one guy similarly maybe he did have direct training on contact but it was of a fairly low level he parks a car in Times Square and it doesn't work so there's another guy on a plane and his thing doesn't go off I mean you look at those dots the probabilities over time if individuals are continually inspired to carry out such acts one of them will pop and then we will be challenged to respond to that collectively individually through our government and otherwise we'll be prepared for that moment I doubt it I think we will overreact again and the scale of such an attack I don't think you can easily consign just to one SUV with some explosives in the back of a Times Square summer night I mean there are talented motivated groups in Karachi and in Pakistan that if enabled and if lucky and if really determined they saw what they did in Mumbai you know yes the United States is a pretty hard target to get into as a Pakistani young man with a rucksack you can't turn up at your average airport and kind of walk through the way you could before 9-11 but look it's a big wide world it's got a lot of holes in it and if you're really smart and really good I mean it wasn't that easy to get into Mumbai but those guys trained they had a plan, they were ruthless they hijacked a ship, murdered the captain and sailed right into harbor so things can happen and they had a state sponsor they had a state sponsor or quasi-state sponsor anyway so it is quite likely that the United States will be attacked by terrorists over the next 10 or 20 years I think it's almost certain the question is what will the degree of success be and how will we respond to it I think what is much less likely almost to the vanishing point is that those attackers could achieve effects on the scale of 9-11 I think it would be very... you think about the timelines and the resources and the kind of entrails of that conspiracy I think would be much more likely to be attacked that raises an interesting question 9-11 we can probably say that was a national security problem with the United States is the kind of threat you were describing a kind of second order threat that essentially is Oklahoma City or Pan Am 103 which were pretty... in the post 9-11 era Pan Am 103 looks a lot bigger and probably in the post 9-11 era Oklahoma City looks a lot better but does it really rise to a 9... if Flight 253 had blown up over Detroit the escalation effect of having had this one experience I mean, because I actually I think I would disagree although I think on any given day these capacities exist in the world borders are porous enough and our own instincts and reflexes if anything have geared us up to be sort of more potentially hysterical and our response including politically look at what the earthquake did to us a couple weeks ago imagine especially in this hyper-charged political atmosphere that we're in right now where you have already a nearly toxic atmosphere between the president and a congress of a different party it would be very frightening to contemplate what this occurred on Obama's watch narratives through a whole campaign would be and I actually do agree with Peter that because of the change in our thinking about it in the elevation of this to immediate national security crisis as opposed to potentially sort of terrible one-off incident you know a plane being shot down or some new kind of attack here in Washington the immediate elevation of that into sort of enormous soul-searching is this, you know, have we been thinking about it at all wrong and actually the Bush administration was right so that's what I'm saying we will overreact is that what you're saying? I'm agreeing with you but I'm thinking that the possibilities and the chances of that attack are very good the question for both Steve and Susan to what extent is the media responsible for that but when Pan Am 103 went up there were very few pictures when it went down in Scotland today there would be quasi-live coverage and people tweeting about it and it would be a whole different the problem with that is it's structural what are you going to do? you're going to ban the digital revolution I'm not suggesting that so the reason there were fewer pictures when Pan Am 103 there were quite a lot of pictures of people's information it would be interesting for some PhD thesis to go back and mark a few of these television media-driven episodes and kind of gauge the degree to which they really did saturate consciousness and how that fed reactions and so forth but to the extent that there was less noise less information in the system in 1983 was because media was licensed on finite spectrum with a few quasi-governmental networks in possession of the authority and then that created a smaller world of decision makers who could maybe be influenced or more self-regulating with consequence now you could self-regulate all day long and you're not going to change the way technology brings information to audiences well it's a really interesting question too though because actually having lived in a country like Russia which was actually undergoing a very constant war in which terror attacks were a very regular presence in Moscow in the period in which I lived there which is much more similar to say what Israelis have lived through at various periods than it is anything we've had a lot of this discussion and debate has been virtual in the case of the United States we have not actually been a society under attack it wasn't at the Kyron on CNN America under attack for a long time actually after September 11th but actually it was that attack and then a lot of worrying and discussion about it and what was interesting was Russia obviously is not as media saturated of a society as the one we're living in there's much more heavy handed state control of television and that sort of thing that being said people the possibility of knowing about these attacks in Moscow you know wave after wave really horrendous things happened and people's resilience, people's ability to live in those circumstances is well documented whether it's in the former Soviet Union or in Israel so were we to face the actual threatened but not yet realized you know war of terrorism on our soil I guess as we would come to terms with it in some way I feel certain that the American people would be resilient in the face of a true repeated threat that they would adapt to it that they would place it in context and what's perverse about what we're describing is that it's actually it's a psychological virtual wave of perceptions without real learning because you know if you look at India today, Indian society somebody blew themselves up in front of the New Delhi High Court high court today we're at a security checkpoint now those kinds of events barely make American media they occur every couple or three months and Indian society has adapted to the point where even the politics of terrorism are quite different from the militancy that you might assume that there is a sense that voters want governments to put terrorism into perspective to be vigilant against it, to be aggressive where possible but not to be irrational and they for example rewarded Manmohan Singh after Mumbai precisely because he showed restraint and didn't start the fourth war with Pakistan and you know Britain and its politics offer a similar narrative each country is distinct but the United States has not been tested in the way that the headlines on cable television would suggest that we have been tested unfortunately because it means we haven't lost lives exactly I think we'd love to bring you into the conversation too we'll do questions just please give us your name and who you're with and make it a question if you can wait for the mic that lady here in front thank you very much thank you very much for going into Iraq we were intentionally using the upstream of Afghanistan to move into Iraq and two we've often heard the identification of the importance of the diaspora of South Asia particularly Pakistan and we should be engaging it more why do you think we haven't actually engaged it more both here and they're working with our partners like Britain and they're very large diaspora you want to take the I'm not sure if the diaspora isn't engaged it depends where you are look at the Los Angeles police department or the sheriff I mean his engagement with the Muslim American community is regarded by a model by all sides so I think there's plenty I mean in Dearborn Michigan there's a lot of engagement between the government and the US Attorney of Eastern Michigan and all the different political officials and the police chief there's a lot of very good engagement so the problem is there's a lot of different Muslim communities in this country and some of them are not living the American dream most of them are have higher incomes and higher incomes than most Americans but certainly if you're a Somali American living in Cedar Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis which is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country you're not living the American dream and that's why you may be tempted to this fantasy of going to Somalia to be part of the Jihad but even there the government now has a strategy to combat violent extremism which is not very they haven't defined it particularly well and part of the trying to avoid is to make it entirely about law enforcement but their view is you can engage let's say in Cedar Riverside with the Department of Education if there are truancy problems you can engage with health and human services if there are people who are refugees and so there are a lot of ways to engage with the community that aren't just about law enforcement and I think there's a lot more thinking about it in the last couple of years by the Obama administration and they're trying to avoid some of the pitfalls the British made which was just to kind of seriously about a law enforcement approach to the Muslim community what about the Iraq question well I mean obviously we were talking before about the ways in which the reaction to 9-11 was interpreted by the let's say as President Bush's responsibility he was the President and he created a framework that accommodated what we now know very early discussions about invading Iraq without any empirical evidence that al-Qaeda was in Iraq and so that just sort of speaks for itself but you know the frame was even larger than that it also was meant to facilitate deeper engagement with the government of Colombia against the FARC and so forth I mean to the extent I think there's still history to be unearthed about exactly how this framing involved on a global basis there's been a fair amount of investigation about how the sort of Qassist-Beli and Iraq involved inside the administration but there hasn't been as much attention to the history of how these choices were arrived at and articulated and you know I have heard people say in defense of the decision to embrace the global war on terrorism well we kept getting this advice that it couldn't be a global war on Muslims so we were trying to think of an alternative and the advantage of the global war on terrorism whether there were a lot of terrorists who were non-Muslims so we could attack them all that might have been well motivated but it wasn't a good result Steve I mean Doug Fythe, because I think as you say there's a lot of history still to be written about this and you know George W. Bush's biography doesn't really help us with an explanation of why he decided at the end but Doug Fythe I think got maybe as close as I've seen and maybe it's not a perfect answer which is essentially this was a demonstration project I mean if you even thinking about doing anything that might remotely inconvenience us we're gonna, you're gonna pay a huge cost that's the well that was certainly the vice president's view but what's striking though is that you know they went to great lengths not only to have the broader positioning of a fine demonstration project that you could you're talking about the Iraq war now but they explicitly went out of their way to overstate, misstate and you know put on the record a very sort of dubious explicit connection between or implied explicit connection between the attacks of September 11th and the reason that we're going to war in Iraq which is you know I think that's where history is going to judge them most harshly and you know I remember as we all do being in Kuwait in the run up to the war in Iraq and you know seeing those soldiers in the desert who were busy their preparation for the war at their air base was to write on the side of the bombs they were about to drop inside Iraq and this is for New York you know payback for 9-11 and all those slogans on there so you know it wasn't implicit it was an explicit series of claims that you know obviously were not correct and it's the same thing with the WMD piece which was that different members of the Bush cabinet including the president had different reasons for invading Iraq what they all wanted to do was invade Iraq and then they needed to they came together under that they were literally not to be too you know sort of cynical about it but they needed a narrative to unify them around decisions that they'd actually made for quite disparate reasons they actually didn't all agree on why they were invading Iraq they just agreed that they were invading Iraq and so then WMD and 9-11 became the unifying narrative that could be the external relations strategy that brought them together and the problem was that it rested and or a false assumption that they would be vindicated once they got to Iraq and discovered that there was WMD there if they had discovered that there was WMD then the whole narrative might have stitched together but yeah I think it was that they required a plausible unifying external narrative for decisions that they made for very diverse reasons okay we've been very patient here in the front and then I'll try to get to some people in the back my name is Ilan Jerno from the Einran Institute I'm interested in your thoughts on America's reaction to terrorism but from backed by Iran so groups like Hezbollah since 9-11 because I think that's something that sort of went under the radar since Iraq and Afghanistan became the focus of our attention well I mean you have a very important kind of proxy contest unfolding between the Quds Force and the Iranian government and its adversaries in the Sunni world in Lebanon and elsewhere Hezbollah is obviously the most important and most capable instrument of that kind of proxy contest involves Israel it involves sectarian and other ideological conflicts that the Iranian government's involved in I think what's interesting about Hezbollah and Hamas in the context of 9-11 and in all of this kind of loose talk that we've been having up here I hope not too loose about terrorism is that you know there is an important narrative since 9-11 as well about the consequences of terrorism by groups that are bounded by political territory versus the nature of terrorism that is carried out by groups that see themselves as having no assets to defend so Hezbollah for all of its viciousness and violence and radicalism is by comparison to al-Qaeda self-constraining because it requires constituent politics and a place in Lebanese politics in order to build itself up and you know Hamas essentially governs a rump state in Gaza and therefore self-limiting in the kinds of acts that it can carry out because it requires credibility in Europe and it requires credibility on the international stage in order to carry out its strategy. Now that kind of guerrilla violence stroke terrorism has been a feature of you know sub-national struggles maybe we apply a new language for it maybe in a world of al-Qaeda it has a different context but it's been around for 200-300 years and that doesn't feel quite so new if 9-11 had been the product of a Hezbollah conspiracy then Hezbollah would have been destroyed and Lebanese politics would have been rearranged but al-Qaeda was something less easy to attack because it didn't have that same kind of an address. More questions? Oh hi it's Darryl McLeod I'm with Refugees International and we began by looking at Afghanistan and the fact that we're still there after 10 years and obviously everyone now looking for an exit strategy and one of the things we were there in May that we were looking at were the Afghan local police and the arming of militias which is obviously a key part of Petraeus's exit strategy but our findings were that this ALP piece was actually one of the leading causes of destabilization particularly in the north and so I'd be curious to agate your impression of this idea of arming local militias in your view and what arming local militias might mean for the country three, four years down the line when the west actually leaves? You know one of the great successes of Afghanistan was the DDR program the disarmament of local militias in the 2005 time period I think they 10,000 tons of heavy weapons and 60,000 men were disarmed but it was the victim of its own success because it meant that when the Taliban came into a village there was nobody was able to defend the village so I think the Afghan local police I've spent a fair amount of time in Afghanistan looking into it has actually been quite successful obviously there are going to be problems with it anywhere but I think there are a number of safeguards I mean Karzai you remember Petraeus and Karzai had a huge dust up when Petraeus went to Afghanistan for the first and this was the main issue and Karzai was really pushing back precisely because he was worried about new local militias and I want to Petraeus's first victory was to get him to agree to 10,000 well the 10,000 are selected by the local village each local policemen are selected by Ashura the weapons are handed out by the Ministry of the Interior to the extent that anything is organized in Afghanistan as you know it's a somewhat chaotic country this is a pretty well organized program in terms of the Taliban the Taliban we know from the intelligence they're very threatened by this because where are these ALPs going in they're going into places that were basically Taliban free fire zones in Urskan and Sabal and Kandahar so you know I think that it has been something of a success just in terms of dealing with the Taliban now will it create further problems down the road well you know in Iraq the Sons of Iraq program which is a sort of not totally unanalogist program hasn't been the sort of time bomb that a lot of people said it would be once they started you know the my impression is the Sons of Iraq are doing the army and the police and some of them just to you know they're not sort of they haven't become local militias themselves so we'll see but I think there are some safeguards with the ALP program that are specifically designed to prevent the problems that you saw in the north do you take one or two more sure we'll do a couple more here and then here thank you Richard Wetzel of the German Historical Institute you began at the start with the question are the things that surprised us since 9-11 and one of the things that surprised me was with the ease with which the Bush administration could use the war on terror rhetoric to expand the national security state and essentially eviscerate civil liberties on all sorts of fronts the war at the surveillance Guantanamo detention without trial the torture and all these things so I have two questions about this for you one is were you also as surprised as I was and whether you were or not you know how do you explain the ease with which this was possible really the lack of resistance in American civil society to this or any significant resistance and my second question is you mentioned that basically we haven't had any terrorist attacks in 10 years and even so it's been very difficult apparently for the Obama administration to roll back most of these things that Bush did on that front and so the second question is why after 10 years of no domestic terrorism or you know foreign imported terrorism is it still so difficult to get some of these civil liberties back well for you Susan I mean you know just on Guantanamo it's congress that is preventing the closure of Guantanamo that's you know I'll ask them they make the laws of this country so whether you agree with them or not separate issue it's not so you know I think well and it was both Bush in his second term and Obama by the way who are both on the record as advocating for Guantanamo's closure so it's you know obviously proved a confounding problem and you know this congress continues to actually grow the national security things there's a very under covered story happening right now on the hill in which they are proposing to basically militarize and take out of the hands of the FBI any arrest that can be connected even inside the United States to Al Qaeda and this again this is 10 years after the fact when given all the things we talked about which is why I do come back a little bit to the psychological dimension that we were talking about earlier of this nature but you know there have been oscillations in American history where we go back and forth and certainly if you study war times in Washington and national security policy this is not necessarily an outlier but you know in fact very consistent with the pattern of you know look at what laws were passed in during World War I you know look at what laws were passed during World War II so you know the question is what is the resilience of American institutions after the war you know where are we going to end up with this relevant of a question as what have we just done at one thing which is that analytically you ask if you ask it in analytical tone why well of course many of the victims of the worst abuses the prisoners at Guantanamo the people who were water bordered were non-American citizens and where American citizens were victimized by draconian security policies after 9 11 they tend to be objectified others Muslims who were not treated culturally with the same respect and sort of full rights of cultural integration that other minorities previously alienated had migrated into a state of sort of full cultural citizenship so those were you know failures of the United States and its values but it was sustainable for a while because the victims were you know others and you know I also do think without rationalizing any of those any of that conduct that the attackers on 9 11 and their allies pose a problem for national security that doesn't have easy categorical or other instrumental sort of precedent for it they are warriors in the sense that they see themselves taking up arms as soldiers in a righteous cause but they don't wear uniforms and they live in a battlefield that transcends national borders and it doesn't involve formal declared conflicts now you know you can't wish away the complexity of those facts they are a challenge and you can't argue in the face of the complexity of those facts that all of the constitutional and policing instruments and judicial instruments that were in place on 9 11 were fully adequate to meet that threat that's a legitimate argument but it wasn't persuasive in the face of you know the collapse of the two towers and it's still an argument that I think quite a lot of reasonable people are wrestling with they've narrowed the scope of their disagreements on what since 9 11 but the puzzle remains how do you construct a sustainable regime and every democracy that is targeted by such groups has in fact ended up struggling with this over a long period of time yeah French magistrates can hold people for three years without exactly okay our last question my name is can Dillon I teach history at Mary Mount University do you see it as a problem that Americans still haven't come to a shared understanding about certain key events of the year 2001 and that includes the anthrax mailings which we've been told were done by Bruce Ivins but many well informed Americans disagree yeah I mean I you know it's 9 11 10th anniversary so I get a lot of questions and it's not just Americans who don't have a shared understanding of what happened in 2001 it's not just the anthrax attacks that puzzled them I mean I had a series of written questions just emailed to me this morning from an Egyptian journalist at a leading Egyptian newspaper and the first question was do most Americans still believe that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9 11 in the face of so much kind of that had such a kind of are you still beating your wife tone to it I could just write back and say yes because he was but then I would sound like an arrogant you know so I think there's something not just about these kinds of events and you think about terrorism assassination conspiracy in the history of not just the United States but you know certainly all western societies and there's a constant literature of revision and uncertainty and reinterpretation because of the nature of the event it's it is hidden and therefore subject to argument and misinterpretation and it's a problem exacerbated in our culture by the diversity of publishing that's now available everyone can essentially publish their own narrative of these things and argue in that space so we're you know that's the democracy we live in we'll just have to make the best of it. Yeah I think 46% of Egyptians thinks that the Jews were behind the 9 11 attack but 70% of Americans thought Saddam was personally involved six months into the Iraq war and continued the numbers stated like 30% for five years later so conspiracy theories or not although I would say this the persistence in the United States of conspiracy theories is very low overall persistence very low well there was that phase when people thought that the Pentagon attack was right I mean quite a lot of Americans looked at the video and concluded that it had been photoshopped or something but in a lot of ways our dissonance is also with other parts of the world and that's part of the problem I think of for American power projecting forward but thank you so much all of you coming out and braving this real storm and you know there's lots to read out there in terms of September 11th the commemoration so thank you again.