 Because I know we all want to get started and hear from these two terrific guys and my colleague, Tom Sanderson. Good evening and welcome to the Center for Strategic International Studies. My name is Andrew Schwartz and I am Senior Vice President here for External Relations. I'm actually a poor stand-in for CSI's CEO, John Hammering, who's known Eric and Tom Shanker for a very long time and is a great admirer of their work. Dr. Hammering is in Japan right now, but he sends a hearty congratulations to Eric and Tom for their great success with this fascinating book. Eric and Tom are really easy guys to introduce, although I work with them frequently and try to conduct myself professionally when in their presence. They also know that I'm their biggest fan and I'm grateful that they usually don't take advantage of that, so it's easy to introduce them. And having now divulged that I'm a Schmitz-Shanker groupie, I don't need to gush about their pure surprises, breaking big news stories, adding context to and making sense of the complex national security arena as very few journalists in Washington know how to do. I'm just going to tell you a simple reason why these two men are the best at what they do. Why senior officials, both current and former, will talk to them and tell them things that help the rest of us understand the world better. It's because they're intellectually honest and it's because they're trustworthy and that's a rare commodity these days. So with that, I'd like to give the floor to my colleague Tom Sanderson. We'll get this program started. Thank you so much. Great. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Tom and Eric. As Andrew said, my name is Tom Sanderson, the deputy director of the Transnational Threats Project here at CSIS. My boss is Arnold DeBorghraub, who's a legendary journalist and just shared some of his insights over the last several decades of covering a lot of wars and so we're happy to welcome Tom Schanker and Eric Schmit, the co-authors of the book you see there in front of us, Counter-Strike, the Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al-Qaeda. Eric and Tom, as you probably know by now, are two of the most widely recognized and widely respected names in national security reporting and they do it for the world's most storied newspaper, The New York Times. If you're not reading their bylines, you're missing out a lot on super perspectives on a wide range of important and pressing challenges facing the US and the world at large. Let me just give you a little bit on their background. They're both reluctant to hear it, but I'll make sure the crowd understands who they're with here. Tom is a correspondent covering the Pentagon military national security topics for the New York Times. He was named Pentagon correspondent in May 2001 and has conducted embeds with Army Special Forces in Kandahar and then with several units in Iraq. Prior to joining the Times, Tom was a foreign editor of the Chicago Tribune covering wars in the former Yugoslavia out of Berlin from 92 to 95 and was also the Moscow bureau chief for the Tribune from 85 to 88, which were clearly very key and very exciting years to be there. First years of Gorbachev era in arms control. Tom, fellow Fletcher alum, has published in the New York Times Sunday magazine, New York Review of Books, The New Republic, American Journalism Review and Military Review and is a senior writer in residence at the Center for New American Security and is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Eric Schmidt is a senior writer who covers terrorism and national security issues for the Times. Since 2007, he's reported on terrorism issues, including assignments in Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. He was first appointed as Pentagon correspondent for the Times in May of 1990. Some of Eric's special projects at the Times include the HUD investigation in Puerto Rico in the spring of 1990, Persian Gulf War in Saudi Arabia in Kuwait from January until March of 1991, also very hot time there. The war in Somalia in December 1992 and the conflicts in Haiti in September of 1994. Eric has shared in two Pulitzer prizes. In 1999, he was part of a team of New York Times reporters awarded the Pulitzer for coverage of the transfer of sensitive military technology to China. And in 2009, he was part of another team at the Times rewarded the Pulitzer for coverage of Afghanistan in Pakistan, also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a bachelor's degree from Williams College. Eric also attended Harvard's executive program on national and international security and completed a one-year night journalism fellowship at Stanford University. So very impressive indeed. In September, my colleagues and I, some of them in the room here, finished this report on the future of al-Qaeda and associated movements looking out into 2025. What you'll hear tonight are some of the more compelling details of what brought al-Qaeda to where it is today and also our effort to disrupt and defeat al-Qaeda and its affiliates along the way. Tom and Eric have spent countless weeks and months on the ground in the battlefields and neighborhoods and communities where we're confronting al-Qaeda. Truly courageous for having done so. You guys have been on the front lines in working with our war fighters and then going to the Pentagon and working with the strategists and talking to them. And I think that provides you with very unique insights. They have tremendous sources in Washington and around the world in the war zones and everywhere in between. I read the book on my flight back from Singapore on Friday. It was a great way to pass 18 hours and provides fantastic details. I've been covering it since 1998 and I learned a lot by reading the book and it was very, very good. And looks at a lot of the challenges in pursuing AQ in the early years on account of the poor organization in cooperation we had within our government and the sharp competition over intelligence, collection and the custody of information. A lot of good details on that as well as the use of deterrence frameworks for looking at countering terrorism and also some good details on our troublesome partner, Pakistan. So what Eric and Tom will do is spend the next 15 to 20 minutes giving some insights on some of the elements that they think are the main points of interest in the book and I'll inject a series of questions throughout that and then we'll open it up to Q&A. So with that, Eric and Tom, thank you for joining us. An excellent book and we're looking forward to hearing more. Well, Tom, thank you very much for that kind introduction and thank CSIS for having us here tonight. Actually CSIS has been a great supporter of this work starting with Dr. Hamry and many of your colleagues here, including yourself and Ozzie Nelson, Wanzirate and many others who spent many hours with us helping us and educating us on the terrorism threat and challenges we face today. So we greatly appreciate that. I'm just gonna start talking a few minutes about how this book came to be. Tom and I have been colleagues for many years, over 10 years really and about three years ago, we were looking at a project, looking at how the US and the government was looking at how to combat terrorism more effectively and this is early 2008. And as we started doing our interviews, the Pentagon and State Department White House, several people told us to understand where we are today as in 2008. You have to understand where we were in 2001, particularly on 9-11. And the two main themes we came away as we interviewed more and more sources were these two things. One is that very few people in the United States government on 9-11 knew much about al-Qaeda, knew much about terrorist organizations at all. It was something that, terrorism was something that happened overseas despite the attacks in Oklahoma City, despite the attacks going all the way back. The Bay of Bombings, and as recently at that time, is on the USS Cole in 8, just wasn't something that affected Americans too much. The other thing that we were drilling down on was how the US government responded to the 9-11 attacks. And perhaps understandably, it was one that used the power of the American military, first and small, numbers of special forces, as well as intelligence operatives from the CIA, but eventually grew as the conflict spread and the fight turned to Iraq. And the common theme, the common approach at that time really seemed to be that the United States could kill and capture its way to victory. That is if you killed enough militants, enough of the foot soldiers, if you killed or captured enough of the commanders that this enemy too would collapse. And it could be done with it and move on to the next challenge. And it really wasn't until December of 2003 when then Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld pens a very important and now somewhat famous memo at that time, and of course this is the time where we have to tell our editors that just because Don Rumsfeld said it, didn't make it automatically wrong. And what Rumsfeld does in this memo to half a dozen or so of his top civilian and military aides is ask this very important question. Is, the question he's asking, is our approach right now in fighting militants? And by this time he's talking about, this is December of 2003, so he's talking about Iraq. Is our approach today, is actually creating more insurgents than we are able to take off the battlefield. And if we are creating more, we need to come up with a new strategy. Again, kind of a classic Rumsfeldism, if you can't solve a problem, expand it. That's what he did, and looking at that. And so what we do in our book is really take a look over the next decade at how the US government goes from having a very narrow and very limited understanding of al-Qaeda as an organization and of terrorist networks in general and how al-Qaeda works within that organization, those terrorist networks, to a much more nuanced, though still imperfect, understanding of how terrorist organizations operate around the world and how they operate as networks and as such how you can defeat them as networks. We also look at how that approach changed in how you go after al-Qaeda and how you go after other terrorist networks that interrelate to that. And that while the military and intelligence community are still crucial to this campaign, as we saw most clearly in the Navy Seal Raid in Abbottabad in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. We talk about this as a much more holistic approach to fighting terrorism today. Or not only do you have special operations forces and intelligence community doing their jobs, but you have the State Department and diplomats overseas working much more closely to identify and address the root causes of terrorism. You have FBI agents who are deploying in large numbers overseas to work with their foreign counterparts and how you can combat threats there. You have agencies such as the Treasury Department getting very involved, in fact playing a lead role in the US government in choking off the finances that support terrorist networks overseas, how you do that. And so again, this twin approach starting coming together, still imperfect to be sure, still very much evolving, both the threat that we face, the US government faces overseas from terrorist organizations today, not just al-Qaeda, but now some of its franchises that have cropped up. And then the approach the United States government working obviously within the government, breaking down walls to cooperate more closely, and then just as important, working with its foreign counterparts and allies across the board, since terrorism of course is a transnational threat. Something Tom is obviously very concerned about and educated us on greatly. So how did all this come about? How did the US government start making this evolution? How did they move off of Rumsfeld's memo in December of 2003? Let Tom tell you a little bit more about that. Thanks. I'd like to echo Eric's board of appreciation to CSIS for hosting this every day, but in the future. CSIS has really been a valuable resource to us as reporters for a very long time. Still not, that's all. In fact, John Henry's been a great supporter of our work and the only time still can't hear. There we go. Now it's on. Thank you very much. Just to echo Eric's word of thanks to CSIS for hosting us here today, to Andrew and Tom for your hospitality, to all of you for spending part of your evening. In fact, the only argument I've ever had with John Henry was when I kept listing his name as possible successors to Robert Gates. He said, stop, I have a lot of work to do here. And those mentions were as much my casting of private vote as anything I was hearing in the halls of the Pentagon. As Eric and I approached the organization of our book, which we've more or less been reporting for a decade, but focused on for the past two and three, I have to say that everything I've learned to be a good reporter today, I've picked up from three sources. My wife, Johnny Cash, and the United States Army. And the third of those was really the most important because the way the military organizes the world is into tactical, operational, and strategic. And that's what we do with our book. We have a lot of what we think are very fresh and interesting case studies at the tactical level, the things that the young men and women are doing downrange in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere. And we use those like a business school model, a case study of what right looks like and what needs to be improved. The book looks as well at the operational changes across the US government, how the interagency evolved, how they knocked down walls from a time when the spies didn't like working with the diplomats. The diplomats couldn't work with those who wore camouflage to really a sharing of information. But because the first S in CSIS stands for strategic, I thought I'd spend a couple of minutes now talking about one of the narrative spines of our book, which is the search for a new strategic doctrine in the world of counterterrorism. And it's interesting to note that one of the real revolutions for Eric and me as we reported this, we talked to all of the senior officials of the Bush administration. And even though President Bush described himself as the war on terror president, he never once convened the National Security Council at the principal's level to talk about the war on terror as a synthetic, holistic, conceptual strategy. They met on financing, they met on the war in Afghanistan, but they never met to ask, they never met to ask a fundamental question. Do we have a strategy? Do we need a strategy? And so that work was done at some of the regional combatant commands, especially strategic command. And it really got started deep in the bowels of the Pentagon in the policy shop under Doug Fyte. And there was an old cold warrior working there and he was assisted by someone who's really like a young Jedi knight. He's a Hollywood handsome research assistant who was on loan from CIA. We're thinking Matt Damon might play him in the movie and if there are any film directors here who want to buy the rights, we're certainly available to negotiate afterwards. And they really asked the question, are there lessons from Cold War deterrence and containment that we can apply to the new threat against America of terrorism? And it's interesting because early in the Bush administration the various national security strategies said flat out, these are undeterrable people. Millennial terrorists have decided to give up their lives and you can't possibly deter them. They don't really hold territory the way the Soviet Union did that you can put at risk. I mean after all the Soviet Union had factories and military bases and the leadership themselves were identifiable. And of course an intercontinental ballistic missile coming at us leaves a perfect return address on the radar. Terrorists try not to do that until afterwards. So while all comparisons are somewhat suspect they did a lot of deep intellectual work and they identified virtual areas that terrorists need to operate that you can hold at risk. That you can threaten to alter the behavior. And they identified a very specific list of them and I'll just read them to you because they're very interesting. Success, terrorist value success. The extent that you can prevent them from moving ahead with an attack or at least instill uncertainty you can actually deter them from moving forward. They want glory. They care about their personal reputation. They need support and cohesion across the network. They want to be honored and respected across the Muslim community. And of course they need money. Doesn't take a lot of money to be a terrorist. Takes a lot of money to run a terrorist network. So the job became how to find ways to impose penalties on those virtual safe havens that terrorists need. How could you threaten those areas to alter the behavior of terrorists in a way to influence their thinking to not mount an attack in the first place? And in many ways this harkens back to the initial use of the word deterrence long before the nuclear war. It was embedded in criminal law. You think about a policeman on the beat. Bars on the windows. Prisons with impenetrable walls. All those are there to instill a deterrent effect in the minds of potential criminals so they won't even consider committing the crime. Well the Rumsfeld policy shop did a lot of work on this. And the defense secretary decided to take it down to Crawford, Texas and present this new thinking to President Bush. Well it turned out that President Bush wanted to be a war on terror president and not the deterring terrorist president. And he really rebuffed Rumsfeld and he said, I'm just not buying this. And as fate would have it, in that meeting at the ranch in Texas was a four star general named James Cartwright who went on to become the vice chairman but at the time was commander of the strategic command that held all the traditional tools of American nuclear deterrence. The missiles, the bombers, the submarines. And the president turned to him and said, Haas, which was his fight or call name. What do you think about this nonsense that Rumsfeld's talking here? Well it turned out that Cartwright had been doing a lot of similar thinking. He said, well Mr. President, actually there's a lot here. Cartwright was at Crawford that day to talk about missile defense which of course was one of the Bush administration's most favored programs. And what Cartwright said to that room in a very persuasive fashion was he said, Mr. President, you are a great supporter of missile defense. Even though we're only talking about a few dozen or a few score missile interceptors, certainly not a sufficient number to guarantee that we will prevent any nuclear missile from ever hitting United States. But you support this system because even having an inadequate missile defense injects uncertainty into the minds of the leaders of North Korea or of Iran. So if you believe a very porous missile defense system has a deterrent effect, how can you not support an imperfect concept of deterrence against terrorists as well? Fast forward to this past January when Admiral Mullen signed out the new national military strategy which enshrines for the first time deterrence as a central core of American counterterrorism policy. So where does that leave us today? 10 years after. We walked through the book, we walked through a number of examples of how some of this deterrence plays out, how the American military working with its counterparts throughout the government and with other allies start to figure out how you can go after the terrorist network through various nodes. And I think we saw the culmination of that in May with the Navy SEAL raid using intelligence gathered from multiple sources on the safe house, the house that Osama bin Laden was living in in Abbottabad, Pakistan. And this basically was a mission that Secretary Gates told us in an interview before he left town was just something that wouldn't be possible. Basically combining these kind of forces, having an operation carried out by Navy SEALs but under the direction of the CIA director inside of Pakistan, that was just something that would not have been possible on 9-11 itself. So there's an evolution that we've seen here. And it's an evolution too in terms of what happened to the threat as a result through raids like these, the drone strikes we've seen in places like Pakistan, the threat from core al-Qaeda leadership in the tribal areas of Pakistan has been greatly diminished. Their ability to plan and execute attacks against the United States homeland and against American interests have been greatly diminished today. So that's the good news. The not so good news is that al-Qaeda is like a corporate entity. It has created franchises around the world. You have al-Qaeda franchises now in North Africa, in the Maghreb. You have them in East Africa and in Somalia. You have them in Iraq still today, making a comeback to some extent. And perhaps most worrisome, you have the al-Qaeda affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. This, after all, was the affiliate that was responsible for the so-called underpants bomber, the young Nigerian man who tried to blow himself up on Christmas Day 2009 in a jetliner over Detroit. 10 months later, same organization packs explosives into printer cartridges, puts them on cargo planes that are being routed through Europe, bound for the United States, and butt bread and tip from Saudi intelligence could well have exploded and created more havoc there. So you have still al-Qaeda is still trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction. They're still out trying to get the big bang. But unlike core al-Qaeda in 9-11, you also have these smaller franchises that are out looking to perhaps carry out smaller scale attacks that are harder to detect. And what still is the printer cartridge plot illustrates could perhaps still create a lot of havoc, not necessarily on a scale of mass casualties as the 9-11 attack did, but economically. I mean, this is an attack, after all, that the al-Qaeda affiliate bragged about in their online English language magazine, Inspire, cost only $4,200 to carry out. And yet, it essentially shut down much of the world's air transport system for a couple of days and cost the West tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, to secure and safeguard that air transport system for the future. And again, Bob Gates told us in one of the last interviews we had that what you can expect from these type of al-Qaeda affiliates now is the idea of throwing pebbles into the cogs of the Western machinery, and to bring down the economy as well. So the threat is coming from these smaller franchises. It's also coming from radicalized Americans here in the United States, so-called homegrown terrorism. And this is very troublesome for the FBI and local law enforcement, because unlike the cells that we've been talking about to this point, where you can detect a part of that cell, you can pull the string and perhaps disrupt or defeat that terror attack, now we're talking about one or two individuals, oftentimes working from their homes off of radicalized online videos that tell them how to carry out an explosive attack, how to mount some kind of small arms attack like we saw at Fort Hood. So what we argue at the end of our book and one of our conclusions is the United States will be attacked again. The next attack is coming. What this government has not done, starting with the president all the way down through to local leadership, is to help prepare the United States public to deal with that. What it has failed to do is instill a sense of resilience. And by resilience, we're talking not about physical resilience. That is, if anybody who watched the commemoration ceremonies at 9-11, ground zero can take great pride in how the American public can rally around and rebuild what's been destroyed by terrorists. What we're talking about instead is psychological resilience. That's the kind of resilience the Israelis have, the Brits have, and many other publics whose countries have undergone threats and attacks from terrorists in the past. So this is a very difficult proposition though. How do you instill that without having to go through it? And the president started down this road on the 9-11 anniversary talking about the R word, resilience. But it's a very difficult thing to do in this highly charged partisan political environment. Is any sign that you're accepting the idea that there will be another attack, your political opponents, whoever you may be, can accuse you of being soft on terrorism, being weak on defense. So I think it's incumbent upon us all, really, at the level of the president started, but down through local community level, all the way to have that sense of resilience repeated over and over. And it's kind of a national conversation because when the next attack comes, as we believe it will, you don't know exactly in what form or what time frame, what the terrorists want nothing more is for the United States to overreact, for the American public to overreact, which they will do without that psychological resilience. Anyway, Tom and I are again, it's a pleasure to be here. We look forward to your questions and thank you very much for coming tonight. Great. Thank you, Eric. Thank you, Tom. Well, Eric, you answered part of one of my questions, so I'll modify it a little bit, but let me start off with a broad question. That is, to ask the two of you who've been on the ground, you've talked with the war fighters, the intel community, the strategists at the Pentagon, think tanks, academics, lots of folks, insurgents themselves, I'm sure, and militants. So how would you describe the degree and nature of the threat as you see it today and in the near-term future? You know, a lot of people are unsure as to how to describe it. It's fluid, it's dynamic, and there's a lot of change, certainly in the core leadership, but you have the affiliates that morphine day-to-day, al-Shabaab is up one day, it's down the next. AQAP is considered as significant as Al-Qaeda Central core, then they lose al-Aulaki, and that scene is a significant dent in their ability. So how would you describe the degree and nature of the threat today? And do you think we're well-positioned to counter it? I think, and sure, I think we're in much better position than we were on 9-11 to counter it as well for many of the reasons we've talked about, that there's better cooperation within the US government, there's better cooperation within various other governments. There are more tools at our disposal and I think the government and the public, it's a more mature approach now 10 years later. It's still evolving, but it's a more mature approach in trying to understand what that threat is and how you react to it. As I think we mentioned in our talk, I think the threat of another 9-11, kind of mass casualty attack is much less than it was certainly 10 years ago. Not that it couldn't happen again, not that we couldn't have a radiological bomb, a dirty bomb take place in a major metropolitan city and a subway system somewhere. But I think the greater threat is coming from one of those franchise type attacks. Again, looking at a more vulnerable target could be American interests in the West, but it still could be here. Many still have this great bomb maker, Alasiri, who's out there, who's the guy responsible for both the underwear bomber and the printer cartridge plot, so that's very dangerous. And then the one that many counterterrorism officials talk about is that homegrown threat because it is so hard to detect. They may not be as capable as terrorists who've taken their training overseas or grown up in that sense, but because it's so hard to detect if there is somebody out there who can get that chemistry just right. Faisal Shazad, he had the moment in that SUV in Times Square, he just didn't get his chemistry right there. But somebody like that in a populated urban setting like that could create quite a bit of havoc. Yeah, I mean, your use of the word evolution, I think, is just so right on point, Tom. In our book, we describe terrorism and counterterrorism as the new Darwinism because the adversary is a learning, changing and evolving enemy. The US government, belatedly, but now more rapidly, has learned to change and evolve as well. We were talking before, one of the most painful examples of this new Darwinism is the IED threat in Afghanistan. The insurgency comes up with an IED technique. The American military and the intelligence community identify it, come up with countermeasures in about two weeks' time, 14 days. 14 days later, the insurgents have another technique in place. So that is Darwinism at sort of a technological pace that's never been seen before, and that is a symbol of what's happening across this battle with a terrorist adversary. We don't know what kind of attack is going to come next. But the real, I think, recent thing to me is that we've moved from tactical success to tactical success. I mean, the American military, intelligence community, have been racking and stacking bad guys for 10 years as if it was Christmas cordwood. But we have not achieved a strategic victory. And so that, I think, is the missing piece. And as Eric said, so I think, you know, articulately until this nation has a public attitude of resilience to attack, even a failure so frightens us into behavior that it becomes a strategic victory for the adversary. Excellent. So taking that a little bit further, what are the tenets of an effective strategy both at home and overseas? I mean, I think it's a lot of the Ds. I mean, I think the deterrence we've talked about, the disruption, which is the OA game. And I think the barriers that are going up around Washington and other cities, however unsightly they are, really do have an important effect. I mean, our reporting showed that early on, there were a number of serious al-Qaeda plots that were disrupted by their own internal thinking because they were not convinced of success. And al-Qaeda senior leadership for a couple of years would rather not have an attack that failed. They'd rather not attack at all than have an attack that failed short of the 9-11 scenario. I think one thing we have to watch is what's not working well. And this is one of the most, we point on our book, one of the most troublesome areas, most vaccine problems for the government is still going out to the ideology. Because even as John Brennan and others, Doug Lude, talk about if you only take half a dozen more of these top leaders off the battlefield, we'll basically reduce al-Qaeda and its affiliates to propagandists. Well, I mean, I think that would be great if that happens, but the United States still has not got a good way of handling this ideology. And it's a very simple but powerful message that al-Qaeda continues to espouse. And that is the West and the United States. Is it war with Islam? Just look at continued American presence, military presence in troops, small numbers, albeit in declining in Iraq, in Afghanistan, the Israeli conflict that remains there. This continues to produce plenty of fodder for recruiters, al-Qaeda recruiters around the Middle East, around North Africa to recruit individuals who are willing to give up their lives. The number of suicide bombers is not going down in many of these places. And so how do you get at that? That's very difficult, particularly if you're the United States government, when your message does not have any credibility on the street or you're trying to do it. There are programs, the Defense Department, State Department, these digital outreach teams that are trying to kind of be right in there in the trenches and combating this narrative. But really what we talk about in our book is how it takes credible Muslim voices to go after and tackle this ideology. Remember, al-Qaeda is still a very small organization, very small network. We're talking about a very small number but very vocal and very well organized who are espousing this kind of violent extremism. But until you have the ability to take that on and to talk about al-Qaeda's attacks, which are largely directed and inflict pain against Muslim civilians, men, women and children, and get that message across over and over. I think that's when you start maybe having some impact on the al-Qaeda brand, which is still quite resilient out there. Certainly is, and we, even if our boots are not on the ground, as you identified the places where they are, if you look at Bin Laden's open letter to America where he explains the seven reasons why we are attacking you, he starts off because you're attacking us. And he cites actions, Russian actions in Chechnya. And he says, you condone those actions and essentially we're facilitating them in his minds yet we clearly don't have any boots on the ground there. So it's very difficult and also it's very easy to manipulate those images and when you have tens of thousands of young men who are disenfranchised and marginalized, you're empowering them with these images and that is tremendously difficult to counter. I have several other questions, but we have a good sized crowd here so I'd like to open it up to the crowd and then we'll put them in. Please wait for the microphone and identify yourself before asking a question. Okay, all the way in the back there. Yep, exactly, thank you. My name is Shoji Motoka from Johns Hopkins Size and I am former Islamabad villager of Japanese public broadcaster NHK from 2006 to 2009. Recently I got a chance to talk with my source in Pakistan who are familiar with the Chechen tribal area. They're looking at the past one year and a half. The number of al-Qaeda in tribal area is now shifting to the overseas like Yemen or Middle East area. So they're moving for the overseas. So of course, the tribal area is now right now safe haven for the Hakanian and maybe these guys are attacking the U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but looking at the point of source of global jihad, do you think potential threat of a tribal area has become less than before or are still there strong potential threat to the global jihad as a source of extremism or terrorism stuff? Thank you. Well, the core leadership obviously is still there. Zawahiri is still somewhere there where these in the tribal areas or a city in Pakistan we don't know exactly. Taking Bin Laden out and taking the iconic figure for al-Qaeda was extremely important but it wasn't sufficient to end the war against terrorism there. So I think while the leadership, it's been diminished and the leadership that's been hiding out in the tribal areas diminished and maybe perhaps spread to other places and urban areas in Pakistan, perhaps even some of the mid-level people I think and foot soldiers may have fled Pakistan. I'm not sure about any more senior level approach. I mean, I think you still have that kind of core there but you still have other influential leaders that are kind of cropping up from time to time in other places. And so I think it's again this dispersion of the al-Qaeda brand, this dispersion of the al-Qaeda ideology that makes it so difficult to stamp out all together. I think in terms of the leadership overall it's interesting to watch to see, it's still an open question as to whether Zawakiri has been able to consolidate his power and his influence over the organization. That's still something many analysts are watching. Any comments? Okay. Yes, in the front here. Thank you. George Nicholson from Stratcorp. Tom, I sort of alluded to congressional hearing and asked you the question. But going through the book, turning to the back, key people who've been involved in this, I don't see any of the key former commanders of USOCOM referenced. I don't see any of the other key people. And I asked a retired four star general about that and he said, they never came to me, they never made any attempt to approach me. So in terms of not referencing any of the key people in the special operations community, did you talk to them but weren't able to reference them in the book where they wouldn't talk to you or what's the background of that? Sure, that's a fair question and I can answer that without ruining our relationship with sources. One of my favorite case studies in the book about the Sinjar raid and the exploitation of intelligence, we got official cooperation from Special Operations Command. We spent time there, got a full mission tactical briefing. We spoke to a number of retired and current special operators, but because they are, they call themselves the quiet professionals, they'd rather be the silent professionals, we weren't able to attribute them. So obviously, you are very well versed in the community, you know a lot of people. I'm sure there are some out there who say, wow, why the hell did an Eric and Tom call me? Well, I'm sorry, but we reached out to quite a few and the book would not have been possible without the cooperation and support of a great number of operators. Fair enough. Great. On the left side here, anyone? Yep, okay. Hi, Christina Sevilla. Just a general question, it sort of seems that your book kind of actually highlights an instance during the time when there are high levels of disenchantment with the efficacy of the government, where here's an instance where very large bureaucracies were able to reform their mission in a quite short amount of time and actually produce results, counterterrorism results. Do you think that this is unique to the defense and intelligence communities or are there broader lessons here for the ability of government to be able to reform itself to become more efficacious? And then the second question is, do you think that the deterrence tactics that have been identified in the first 10 years will continue to be as effective for some of these small attacks but which can have great asymmetric economic damage, $4,200 for hundreds of millions of dollars in reforms. I mean, is there just a strategy here in a situation of debt and deficit where we're not going to be able to respond with all of the tactics that we need to on an economic basis? I'll try and tackle that first question, Christina and Amy Tom, I'll take on the second one. We did approach this book, looking at trying to tell kind of fresh lessons, things that hadn't been told in the battlefields of counterterrorism. And many of these battlefields were off the traditional battlefields that you think of in soldiers and spies fighting it out. And often kind of duking it out bureaucratically back here in Washington and trying to explain how, again, while imperfect still today, to be sure, that there is a much greater cooperation among military and intelligence soldiers and spies, for instance, working on the ground all the way back here in Washington, but other agencies that have gotten much more involved in this fight at different levels. You mentioned the Treasury Department, for instance, playing a much more active role in trying to choke off financing. Some of that existed, of course, prior to 9-11, but not anywhere to the degree now that you understand how if you can combat terrorism financing, that makes a big difference. The Agriculture Department of all places sends people out to these provincial reconstruction teams. So in a way, they are playing a greater role, although not a huge role, but a greater role in looking at some of the root causes and how you can get a population back on its feet in terms of that. So I think looking at this in this book is trying to shed some, say, its success stories. I think we have some of those, but we also point out some of the shortcomings, particularly on the countering ideology front that addresses that. And I think there are lessons here, because what we try to do is go two, three, even sometimes four layers below the principles, the Rumsfelds, the Wolfowitzes, the Bushes, the Cheneys. Most people have heard about trying to see what was going on in kind of the working level, whether it's in the bureaucracies here in Washington or on the field, and what kind of creative solutions are people coming up with? How are they pushing back against their bureaucracy? Maybe he doesn't quite get it yet. And trying to shed light on that and how many of the ideas that come about are at that middle and lower level and work their way up and finally are embraced, just as Tom talked about, the idea of deterrence. And I think the application of the new deterrence going forward is as relevant, if not more so. Yes, Allaki was killed. Yes, Bin Laden was killed, but their network still exists. The brand has not been tarnished. So if you want to achieve something that moves from a tactical success to a strategic victory, this work to understand terror networks and to identify the vulnerable nodes of the financiers, of the bomb makers, of the propagandists and take them down, that's the only way you can even hope to move toward victory. I mean, the conclusion of our book is that this new deterrence has been able to push off the day of the next attack and perhaps lessen the severity. That's what success looks like. And the goal is simply to keep pushing it off and to again lessen the severity of the next attack. So I think that especially the network on network operations which are the core of the new deterrence, I think the government is wholly committed to continuing those. In the front row here. Harry Marshall. And I had a question for Eric and one for Tom. Eric, you mentioned one of the themes of your book is developing resiliency. I was wondering if you could explain how the Obama administration or a subsequent administration would carry this out and whether isn't it even more important that this current strategy for ferreting out terrorist plots before they're hatched might be more important knowing that in terms of protecting the national security of the United States. And Tom, I was curious about your recollection of that meeting in Crawford where President Bush turned to the general responsible for strategic operation. I was wondering after the general gave the president his assessment what did President Bush say? Well to your very good point in trying to instill this sense of resiliency is one of the most difficult things I think leadership of this country has in front of them today. President Obama started down that road by talking about resiliency. I think fully understanding and certainly his speech writers fully understood that when you unpack that word it does mean there will be another attack to come and the government is doing everything it can including ferreting out whatever plot might be available. So I think you have to do both. I mean the government is getting better, it's gotten better at trying to identify early on what are the trip wires that'll give us a signal as to whether there's a plot of foot. But in many cases here's the US is in a position of having to be good and lucky all the time with very high expectations from its public where the terrorists only have to be good and lucky every once in a while to defeat that. And to take you inside our woodward moment of the book. Both the QDR and the national security strategies of 2002, 2003 and 2004 said flat out terrorists cannot be deterred. These are millennial jihadists who are willing to give up their own lives had you just heard them. After the meeting at Crawford in 2005 the 2006 national security strategy said for the first time there may be applications of deterrent techniques and counterterrorism. And as I mentioned the national military strategy released this year said for the first time is a core element of deterrence. So I can't share with you what the president said that day but obviously the impact of that briefing on our strategic doctrine is now a matter of public record. Eric and Tom I know it'll be hard to choose there are a lot of options here but like each of you to identify a tactic, a policy and a person that you think was absolutely instrumental over the past few years encountering al-Qaeda. Well we haven't talked about this yet but a very important part of our book is how the US government really goes about dealing with cyberspace. And cyberspace is perhaps the ultimate safe haven for terrorists where they do a lot of their recruiting where they raise a lot of their money. They even do operational planning over that. We talk about an instance in the book where terrorists are using many of the same kind of games, virtual games teenagers play to plot their attacks using the same vernacular that they play on these war games but they've attached certain code words to that vernacular. So when they get on at a predetermined time and are talking to each other and dealing with the game it means something's going on a lot more than the teenage kids who are playing the same game. So if NSA wants to drill down and get in to look into this it's much more difficult. And yet we talk about in the book how there have been some real successes here and how US analysts have been able to hack into terrorist cell phones, terrorist leader cell phones and basically be able to from those cell phones send out faults or contradictory messages. Same with being able to infiltrate jihadi chat rooms with Arabic speaking or Urdu speaking analysts who may often do nothing more than raise provocative questions to say dear brothers, why is it that we are supporting the bombing of say a wedding party among Jordan that kills scores of innocent civilians, men, women and children? Why is that? How does that advance our goal in trying to bring people around to our cause? And so I think in terms of that there's a great deal of work highly classified work going on right now in cyberspace to kind of counter that virtual haven. There are many people that go unnamed in the book that we can't really talk about but I think that would be one area that I would underscore. Great, thank you. Yeah, I think I could answer your question all in one case study. I mentioned in answer your question the case study of the Sinjar raid and that really showed incredible importance to thinking of Stan McChrystal and breaking down the walls. I mean he certainly is in the military the founder of the Flat Earth Society. I mean he really believed that you should have CIA and DIA and Treasury and DEA all sitting around the table with you, everybody sharing information. And just in quick summary form the Sinjar raid took out the leader of a smuggling ring in Western Iraq that was bringing in all the jihadi suicide bombers because in the middle years of the war Iraqis didn't want to kill themselves for the cause. And so all the suicide bombers in Iraq were foreigners and what they got in this raid was evidence that Al Qaeda is as anal about record keeping as the Nazis and they videoed everything like Tommy Lee and Pamela. And so what they got was an incredible Rolodex of all the hometowns where the suicide bombers were coming from who had recruited them and how they got there and they found ink spots in Libya and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere that were the centers of the recruitment for the jihadis. Now I didn't even realize this after having covered military affairs since ancient Egypt, but he who gets the intelligence owns the intelligence and McChrystal made a very brave decision. He did something no general has ever done before. He gave the entire Sinjar intelligence trove to the State Department so they could go country to country with travel documents, not American documents, not propaganda, not counterfeits and say look, these jihadis are coming from your country. Even if you don't support American policy, some of these guys are gonna come home and they're gonna be smarter and better and they're gonna make jihad in your country. And that diplomatic effort without firing a shot did more to halt the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq than anything else. So that's what Wright looks like. Excellent, excellent, back to the middle. Jerry? Thank you, Jerry Heimann at CSIS. Just relating to that last comment. Wonder if you could say something about Pakistan. Spent some time there. And what's bewildering is why it is that there's maybe over-resilience if you can put it that way in Pakistan. Nothing seems to phase. Anybody? Go to general headquarters, they go to Islamabad, Bihar, the main parts of Pakistan, not just in the Fata. And yet there doesn't seem to be a response commensurate with the threat to the national security and in fact even the national social fabric. No wonder you talked to anybody there and could figure out why it is that that happens. I'll take a crack that I've spent some time in Pakistan over the last three years or so. And I think clearly this is one of the most vaccine problems for the United States foreign policy community. And what to do with this key ally, nuclear armed ally that's obviously looking across its border with another nuclear rival of India, which helps to explain a lot of the tensions and I think contradictions that we see in Pakistan's apparent policy. And how is it that Pakistan on the one hand can support American efforts to go after Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and some other militant groups? In fact they played a very important role particularly early on in helping root out some of the key Al-Qaeda leaders in their cities. And yet at the same time support organizations like the Taliban, like the Akhani network that are the number one killer of American troops and allied troops in Afghanistan. I mean if you explain this to the average American it's like how can we be doing this and we're giving this country $2 billion in military aid a year? How is this working out? And it's obviously it's very complicated in trying to reconcile these two things because the United States needs Pakistan, Pakistan needs the United States and it's not something I think we go through, the country has gone through some very difficult times. The US has in its relationship, it's probably at its lowest point right now even after the trip that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made just recently in trying to both help persuade the Pakistanis to look at things from the United States standpoint in terms of the threat that these militant groups are posing and these militant groups by the way are starting to bleed together more and more. You don't have a nice neat division between the Akhani network, the Pakistani Taliban, the al-Qaeda, these organizations are bleeding together and they're conducting organizations like you would a pickup basketball game. Somebody brings the bombs, somebody brings the guns, somebody brings the truck, they bring beer if they drink there but they don't. It's one of these things where that's the kind of fluidity that you're seeing in these groups and yet you have to look from the Pakistani, put yourself in the position of General Kayani or some senior Pakistani policy maker and they see the date on the wall, it's 2014. That's when the United States says it's leaving and what happens then? It's unclear right now, how will there be Americans who stay in Afghanistan, if so, how many? Is there going to be a political settlement? Are we, the Pakistanis, going to be a part of that? We've seen this movie before when the Americans leave after a major engagement in Afghanistan and we're not going to be caught short again. That's their policy and in that way you can kind of understand where they're coming from, that they're going to support their surrogates in Afghanistan to protect their interests, they fear India infiltrating into Afghanistan and worry about that. And it is remarkable how the country just seems to, whether it's floods, it's incredible electricity in many ways, these growing militant groups, and the calls that apparent that the government will fall any day and yet it seems to kind of muddle through in all this. And that's where the US policy I'm afraid is right now too is to try and kind of keep pushing that, pushing that, it's Tom said, pushing that kind of policy along and to prevent the next attack. I think that's where we are with Pakistan in many ways. Threats haven't helped in terms of threatening to do things, of course, the Pakistanis still control the vital supply routes for troops in Afghanistan through Pakistan. So I think in many ways until the troops are gone from Afghanistan, that leverage will be there over us too. Got a few minutes left, I think you had a question. Okay, great, someone else from the left side? Okay, this gentleman here. Please make your questions quick. We have two left and we'll do those quickly. Mr. Bishop, the Bush administration claimed that non-governmental organizations were being used as a significant conduit for the funding of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations and then imposed restrictions on the non-governmental organizations, which they felt impaired their ability to perform their mission and increase their vulnerability locally. In your research, did you find any evidence that the Bush administration's assertions were true and that non-governmental organizations were a significant conduit for the financing of terrorist organizations? I mean, when you say NGOs, you mean American NGOs? I mean, there's, I think, a good documentary basis for a lot of the charities in Saudi Arabia as funneling money to Al Qaeda and other violent extremist groups. And I know Saudis have tried to crack down on that, but the flow of the money has not been stopped and we have a case study in our book about efforts to stop money transfers through the Huala networks, which of course the informal way. But as far as major NGOs, we did not find any evidence of that. The major, like the Western NGOs? All the way in the back, again, make it quick. We have a couple other folks here to ask. Steve Winters, local researcher. All right, just a quick question. Could you say something about the downside of the increase in sharing of information and the increase in the size of the security establishment? Obviously, we have that Washington Post series of articles and then now a book. But in particular, the diplomatic cables that were eventually leaked by WikiLeaks, it's always said now that that was something that happened because they set up a system to share a lot of information and therefore people who probably shouldn't have had that information could get into those terminals and get it and now that's being corrected now. But I mean, to what, people used to talk about bloated bureaucracies and lean and mean is better. I mean, is there any downside to anything you're saying today? Well, I mean, you've identified a couple of areas. I mean, clearly in the State Department, cables that were leaked, this was through an effort to basically try and allow more people more access to these type of cables. Now that said, the Defense Department did not have adequate security procedures in place. Any company in America, once they heard of what happened there were, I think, aghast. Defense Department didn't have routine kind of procedures that were quickly put into place to protect that kind of downloading of information that allegedly took place. So I think that has been one of the major casualties of this and that the State Department immediately pulled back and cut off, not completely, but certainly restricted the circulation of that secret level cable to a wide distribution of people. Obviously, the greater consequence, of course, is the people on the ground whose names had now been identified in these 250,000 documents and still very concerned about their safety and any chilling effect that it might have for other people, individuals, to come forward and be sources of information to American diplomats overseas. Thanks. Zach Gold from Brookings, also, Fletcher Moldow 9. I just wanted to go back to something that Mr. Shanker said about terrorists like success and Al-Qaeda core stopped projects because they weren't gonna succeed or they might not, which is true, but it seems that AQAP has a different take and I'd love you to expand on that in terms of Operation Hemorrhage and even the underwear bomber, which we mock, we now have the full body scanner that costs millions of dollars a piece. If you go into that, thank you. No, I mean, you're absolutely right. As I describe this as a new evolutionary process of Darwinism, in fact, the upstart franchise in Yemen, just as you said, looked at the Al-Qaeda senior leadership and said, you guys have lost your game. You don't have the fastball anymore because Zawahari and the others only wanted a 9-11 style attack and so the new paradigm is exactly what you said. Eric's metaphor that we borrowed from Secretary Gates, they're happy to throw pebbles into the cogs of Western machinery. Low cost, low risk, huge strategic impact, even when it fails, that is absolutely the new paradigm. One last question here in the middle. Thank you. Hi, I'm Anjalan from SICE. I was wondering that you mentioned a lot of the tactical moves and strategic doctrines that have evolved since 9-11. I was wondering if there was something, any lessons to break the ISI nexus with the Taliban or the Hikani network, something that you could perhaps share that would be interesting? Well, we talk about in our book, things that we published, we and others have published in the New York Times about intercepts, between intercepts and particularly the one I think the best example, the hardest evidence is the ISI complicity in the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, 2008, where among others the defense attaché was there, was killed. And so I think there has been certainly some level of complicity between the ISI, Hikani network and some of these other groups that are carrying out these attacks. It's very difficult when you look at the ISI, which is this big, well, it's a huge sprawling organization. You think of it as a kind of amalgamation of the American CIA and FBI and some other agencies. There's no real American equivalent to it. It has different wings to it. And it's a big organization in the sense that one arm might not know what the other arm is doing in the sense. So there's a great number of retired ISI people that are called upon to continue their function. So it's very difficult when you say the ISI is responsible. Does that mean General Pasha, the current head of the ISI knows everything that's going on? You know, it's unclear. It may be their elements of the, their operations that give the director some kind of deniability. The great unanswered question, of course, from the raid in Abbottabad was just who knew what and what level of the Pakistani security services. Is it possible that the Pakistani spy service had no idea that bin Laden was there? I mean, it's, it's, what balls down to this question, they're either complicit or they're incompetent if they didn't. So it's one of those things. It's a very hard, very hard, you know, to, to, to put off, you know, to get a definitive answer to. Any final comments? No, I guess I would just conclude by saying that if there's one overarching lesson out of the book, it's that after 9-11 and the understandable horror of that terrible day, terrorism was described as an existential threat to our nation on a par with the Soviet Union. Well, the Soviet Union actually was an existential threat. If there had been a thermonuclear exchange, life as we know it would have changed here forever. Terrorism, even on its worst day, any loss of life above zero is, of course, a tragedy. But terrorism has not and does not present an existential threat to our nation. And the challenge for us as citizens, as voters, as taxpayers is to calibrate our response to terrorism understanding it's not an existential threat. So we don't lose those great values of our democracy as we pursue the bad guys. Well put, Tom and Eric, the book is a joy to read and makes a great contribution to the knowledge and the subject and congratulations. Thank you for coming in. Thank you. Thanks, Eric.