Okay, let's go down memory lane. The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, serious threat to security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world's last bastions of central planning, governs by dictating five-year plans, a single capital that attempts to impose its command across time zones, continents, oceans, and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy's gone. The adversary is closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy. We must transform the way the department works and what it works on. Our challenge is to transform not just the way we deter and defend, but the way we conduct our daily business.
We know the adversary, we know the threat, and with the same firmness of purpose that any effort against a determined adversary demands, we must get at it and stay at it. Some might ask, how in the world could the Secretary of Defense attack the Pentagon in front of its people? To them, I reply, I have no desire to attack the Pentagon. I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself. And that means we must recognize another transformation. The revolution in management, technology, and business practices. Successful modern businesses are leaner and less hierarchical than ever before. They reward innovation and they share information. They have to be nimble in the face of rapid change or they die.
Business enterprises die if they fail to adapt. And the fact that they can fail and die is what provides the incentive to survive. But governments can't die. So we need to find other incentives for bureaucracy to adapt and improve. Already we've made some progress. We've eliminated some 31 of the 72 acquisition related advisory boards. We now budget based on realistic estimates. We're improving the acquisition process. We're investing $400 million in public-private partnerships for military housing. Many utility services to military installations will be privatized. We have committed $100 million for financial modernization and we're establishing a defense business board to tap outside expertise as we move to improve the department's business practices.
To transform the department we must look outside this building as well. Consequently the senior executive council will scour the department for functions that could be performed better and more cheaply through commercial outsourcing. Like the private sector's best in class companies, DOD should aim for excellence in functions that are either directly related to war fighting or must be performed by the department. But in all other cases we should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and effectively. We have brought people on board who have driven similar change in the private sector. We intend to do so here.
The old adage that you get what you inspect, not what you expect or put differently, that what you measure improves is true. It is powerful and we will be measuring. So that was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a speech at the Pentagon as it turned out on the 10th of September 2001. And as you can tell he is elaborating on the agenda that we've already discussed at length in this course about privatization of military functions without any idea about what's about to hit the country. And so he's not only talking about outsourcing and privatizing but he really came into the Pentagon with a mandate to completely reorganize it along management principles that were deployed in the private sector. And he was busily setting about that agenda in the first month and first year of the administration. But of course 10 days later America was very differently preoccupied.
Their enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them. Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated. These terrorists kill not merely to end lives but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us because we stand in their way. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism, and they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies.
Americans are asking how we fight and win this war. We will direct every resource at our command. Every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence and every necessary weapon of war, to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network. This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago with the decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.
Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists to funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.
So that was President Bush's statement to the nation, the 20th of September, nine days after the 9-11 attacks. And it announced the advent of what we have come since to refer to as the global war on terrorism or the GWAT. And today, the agenda is going to be to explore that. We are going to talk about what was the GWAT and what is it, what does it become. We are going to ask how radical an innovation was it and what did it mean for the emerging post-Cold War international order that we talked about in the very first lecture of the course.
And finally, I want us to also think about as we go through this material, what were the paths not taken? What might have been done differently that might leave us in a different position than we are today? So let's think back to the 1991 Gulf War that I lectured about at the beginning of the course. And particularly George Herbert Walker Bush, Bush 41 as some like to call him. What strategy he pursued when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in December of 1990. And the strategy he pursued had a number of elements.
One was that it was fully authorized through the UN Security Council. Resolutions were passed admonishing Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait, which he ignored in eventually Stonewald, but refused to comply with. Secondly, the Bush 41 administration put together a very large and diverse coalition, which included participants with many different geostrategic interests, including every Arab nation except Jordan, participated in that coalition. They stuck to the limited authorized goal of spelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and made no effort at regime change in Iraq. This is something for which Bush was heavily criticized by neoconservatives in the U.S. We'll hear more about neoconservatism next week. And many people thought he was being too much of a wimp and that once you had half of me in troops there, they should have gone all the way to Baghdad. And interestingly, Dick Janie, who was in that administration, came out as a strong defender of not doing that, partly on the grounds that we wouldn't be able to manage the situation thereafter, the sort of philosophy. If you break it, you own it, which again, we will attend to more next week.
But it was this basic idea that Bush was operating on, that I like to call stop the bully without becoming a bully. So then the notion was that if people engage in aggression across borders, the international community will stop them. But it was consistent with the U.N. Charter's commitment to the maintenance of international peace and security, which is a line in the U.N. Charter, which we saw has come to be questioned subsequently in with the implementation of responsibility to protect, for example. But at the time, it was seen as a sacrosanct commitment of the U.N., essentially to protect the status quo of the division of the world in tenations.
布什当时就是在推行这样一个基本理念,我称之为“制止欺凌者而不变成欺凌者”。也就是说,如果有人在跨国界进行侵略行为,国际社会就有责任制止他们。这一理念与《联合国宪章》中维护国际和平与安全的承诺是一致的。这个承诺在当时被认为是神圣不可侵犯的,是《联合国宪章》的重要原则,尽管后来在“保护的责任”(Responsibility to Protect)的实施中受到了质疑。但在那时,这一承诺被视为联合国基本立场,主要是为了保护世界各国之间的现有分界。
And so you stop aggression, but you don't engage in regime change and you don't arrange the global geography. So over this and the next two lectures, I want people to think about one counterfactual, not the only one, but what if that had become the template for facing down international aggression in the post-Cold War world? And that was clearly part of Bush-41's agenda. He wanted to etch these norms into accepted common law practice, if you like, of international conduct and also the notion that they should all be mediated through the United Nations.
Another way of putting it is that he had a kind of containment sensibility, George Herbert Walker Bush. The idea was to contain aggression, not to solve the world's problems, not to end bad regimes, but to contain aggression, to stop aggression. And of course, the word containment has a long history. It goes back to the Cold War. And I want to take us back through that history because it's really only by having some sense of that history that we can evaluate the extent of the departure that comes with the global war on terror a decade after Bush Sr. was doing this.
So if we think back, the idea of containment, of course, was articulated by George Kennan in 1946 in something which was called the long telegram. Germany was in Moscow at the time as part of the Truman administration. And it was published subsequently, anonymously, with the authorship X as a document in Foreign Affairs the next year called the Sources of Soviet Conduct. And this is the sort of classic statement of the original idea of containment. And it had a number of elements to it. The original doctrine of containment as conceived by Kennan. Kennan first and foremost, he was a staunchly anti-communist, very conservative and indeed held views about race and other matters which would not endear him to many people in this room. Be that as it may, this was his view of the Soviet Union. He thought it was, first of all, fundamentally antithetical to Western democracy. And he thought the enterprise of getting involved in public debates with the Soviets about capitalism versus communism and the desirability of different systems was a total waste of time. There was no possibility of dialogue and he didn't advocate. He thought it was just pointless. And indeed might give propaganda victories to the Soviets in the developing world during the Cold War.
But secondly, he was absolutely unequivocally convinced that the Soviet Union was unsustainable. That it was a flawed economic system for the reasons that we know well, that command economies don't really work. And that eventually it would develop the kinds of problems that it eventually did. But then secondly, and actually in this he was stating something that has since become conventional wisdom among political economists who study international relations, he was convinced that the Soviet Union's hegemonic ambitions would bankrupt them. That as they sought to become a hegemonic power, they would be spending more and more sustaining that hegemony and eventually it would drive them to ruin. And as I say, the conventional wisdom now in the international relations field made famous by people like Stephen Krasner, Robert Kohane and others that hegemonic powers become overextended and eventually find it very difficult to sustain the financing of their hegemony.
So Kenan was contemptuous of all political science and social science. He would have put it in those terms. But his seat of the pen's judgment was that this was a system that was just going to drive itself off a cliff. So then what should the US do? And here Kenan's view was, well the US should forget about the governments in the Soviet Union and really focus its attention on the populations behind the Iron Curtain, essentially to win the battle for hearts and minds. The thought was that as these systems became more and more dysfunctional, people would be more and more dissatisfied and then it would be important first of all for them to see successful models elsewhere. And so he thought it was hugely important to rebuild the American domestic economy at home and to invest in rebuilding Western Europe and Japan.
So a huge supporter of the Marshall Plan. Not partly because of commitment to the West European countries, but from the point of view of his containment doctrine, the idea was that as the populations behind the Iron Curtain experienced increasing levels of poverty and disaffection from their regimes, they would see on television and learn about in other ways the thriving democratic systems in the West. The other side of that coin was he very much wanted to admonish first and foremost the Truman administration but subsequent American administrations in Western governments not to start to become like the Soviet Union. We needed to not behave in ways that would make us seem to be their moral equal. We should therefore maintain civil liberties at home and in our international conduct we shouldn't engage in adventurism. Essentially our goal should be about containing Soviet aggression.
And he thought the principle means of doing that would be economic and diplomatic. So he was opposed to the formation of NATO. For example, he thought creating NATO would just militarize the confrontation between us and the Warsaw Pact. And if we created NATO, the Soviets would do something comparable on the other side which they did. He opposed the Vietnam War. This is much later of course. But again on the theory that this is about something more aggressive than containment. The Vietnam War was motivated by a domino theory that if Vietnam was allowed to fall then the whole of the rest of Southeast Asia would go communist, none of which turned out to be true.
And part of the reason that he was opposed to the Vietnam War was quite prescient which is that if in his mind if you were fighting a war of choice against an enemy for whom it's an existential war. Unless you can have a very quick, cheap, easy victory as you know when Ronald Reagan invaded the Grenada or something of that order. Basically the cards are stacked against you because you're not going to be able to sustain support at home for a war of choice whereas your adversary isn't fighting for their very existence and so they will be able to sustain support. So he was very skeptical of conflicts like the Vietnam War which he thought was a giant mistake.
So that was classical containment doctrine as articulated by Kenan and it didn't get very far. Indeed he rapidly got into conflict with the Truman administration and the Truman doctrine as I've already intimated was revolved around militarizing the standoff with the Soviets in ways that Kenan didn't like. And this was laid out in a document called the NSC68 published in 1950. Many scholars call it the most important US strategic statement of US principles during the Cold War. It was essentially laid out what's come to be known as the Truman Doctrine and it supported the creation of NATO and it supported a much more aggressive stance. Now some scholars still call it containment so John Lewis-Gaddis in his excellent book Strategies of Containment calls this a different kind of containment and I don't have anything invested in the terminology but it's a much more militarized version of containment than Kenan originally envisaged.
For Kenan military force should always be a strategy of lost resort, not a strategy of first resort. You try everything else first and you only use it sparingly to stop aggression when you have to. So even during the Truman administration Kenan had all this conflict and eventually he stormed off in a half to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton where he spent the next several decades occasionally throwing spitballs at one administration after another. So he became a grumpy old man of sorts. But of course the Truman administration was just the beginning of the Cold War and then we had the Eisenhower administration and the Eisenhower administration took a more militaristic view of US foreign policy than the even the militarized version of containment that was embedded in the Truman Doctrine.
And so the Eisenhower comes to power in 1952, the Cold War is ramping up, McCarthyism is ramping up and proponents of containment get accused of being proponents of appeasement. That this is all about appeasement. Of course appeasement is actually giving in to foreign aggression in the way that the British and French did when Hitler was beginning his expansionist policies and then accepting them. Containment is not that. Containment says you do respond to actual attempts at aggression. But short of that you don't involve yourself in trying to rewrite global political geography.
And so John Foster-Dallis who was the John Bolton of his era you might say, he was the proponent of rollback. And rollback was to not accept the disposition, particularly of Europe after the Iron Curtain came down and that he thought we really needed to push back against the Soviet Union much more aggressively than any notion of containment would suggest. And indeed Eisenhower ran on rollback in the 1952 election saying that they would take a much more aggressive anti-communist stance than the Truman administration had done. Interestingly enough of course at that time the Truman administration was bogged down in the Korean War which Eisenhower promptly negotiated his settlement to after not very long in office.
But in any event they ran on rollback. And of course something like rollback became a much more dominant theme if we think about the Johnson administration during Vietnam and Nixon's strategy became more complicated than just straightforward rollback because he wanted to actually in true kennonesque fashion he wanted to exploit divisions among communist regimes that's part of what the opening to China was about. But nonetheless in prosecuting the Vietnam War at least as he did and in the era before Daitan he was something of a hawk with respect to the Soviet Union. And so that was rollback and interestingly when we think about we look back on the Cold War despite what Eisenhower ran in in 1952 and what Dallas came into the State Department attempting to do he found a lot of pushback against rollback in the State Department and found that many people were actually more convinced if not of a kennonesque version of containment at least they were convinced of the Truman Doctrine's version of it.
And so in Europe the US largely did stick to containment as its policy they didn't really try to roll back the frontiers of the Soviet Empire and if you look at where they did try to roll back the frontiers of the Soviet Empire such as in Iran where there was an election in 1953 and a pro-Soviet government was elected we went in and toppled that government and basically implanted the Shah did and turn out that well we engaged in rollback in Vietnam did and turn out that well. So by the end of the Cold War containment and indeed cannon was given a lot of credit as a policy that had actually worked of course whether containment would have worked in the absence of NATO is a question to which we'll never have an answer. So whether it was the cannon asked version of it or the Truman Doctrine version of it nonetheless it was given great credit partly because the early predictions had turned out to be right the economy was unsustainable and the Soviet Union did indeed become bankrupt partly because of Reagan's Star Wars which spent them created in not just an arms race of space-based weapons but a dollar's race and then of course very relevant to today's discussion they got embroiled in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan which turned out to be the Soviets Vietnam.
Interestingly also motivated by domino theory the Soviet belief was that if the Mujahideen succeeded in Afghanistan this would allow Islamic fundamentalism to start working its way through the Asiatic Republics of the Soviet Union and it had to be stopped of course when the domino's finally started falling it was in Western Europe and it had nothing to do with Afghanistan. So George Herbert Walker Bush's policy in 1990 the First Gulf War is really a version of containment as mediated through international institutions. Cannon was a hard-boiled realist and so had no time for the UN and part of the reason he had no time for NATO by the way was again his hard-boiled realism he said no nation is going to bind itself by an alliance if it's not in their interest to do it so it's either going to be irrelevant when it's needed or window dressing when it's not but he also thought no nation was comparing attention to the UN so that aspect of Cannon's thinking is not part of the post-Cold War containment idea that Bush was working to entrench in the way that he responded to the First Gulf War in 1991.
So now let's come to Bush 43's Global War on Terror and what came to be called the Bush Doctrine very rapidly, and we can see what we think about how it contrasts with what had gone before. So the first feature of the Bush Doctrine is that he envisages it as being worldwide in scope. He says we will strike anywhere and we reserve the right to strike anywhere if there is a threat to our national security. Now, of course, America's assertion of unilateral rights to strike perceived threats that were not to the American mainland has a long history.
In fact, goes back to 1823 when John Quincy Adams articulated what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine although didn't actually get named in the Monroe Doctrine until some decades later in 1850 but it was the Monroe administration asserted that any European influence, any European interference anywhere in Latin America would be conceived of and responded to as a threat to the national security of the United States. And so essentially during the Monroe Doctrine said that we control the hemisphere and anybody who interferes in the hemisphere is interfering with America's national interest and we will respond with force.
So that was aimed at the Europeans in the 19th century but it is the precedent if you like to extend there is a precedent for George W. Bush asserting we will act militarily anywhere in the world if our national security is threatened. And indeed interestingly he talked about the axis of evil, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. And of course in those days Iraq was not an Islamic administration. It was a secular Ba'athist regime run by Saddam Hussein. Iran was an Islamic state and North Korea was a communist state and so he was by putting those three together as the axis of evil he was doing two things.
One was he was saying this was the Bush administration's position until 2006 that this is not about Islamic fundamentalism. The terrorism was very careful not to attack the idea of Islamic fundamentalism. The war on terror was not just about Islamic changes that rhetoric after 2006 but also that we would act anywhere in the world. And if you think about non-paying it is 12 time zones away from the East Coast of the United States so the only way you could get further away would be by blasting off into space.
So now we have taken the Monroe Doctrine worldwide. Secondly, we asserted the right to act unilaterally. Unconstrained by any existing alliances and unconstrained by what international institutions might or might not authorize. And indeed this is where he coined the phrase coalitions of the willing. We will put together coalitions on an opportunistic basis if necessary to fight our adversaries. And indeed as I mentioned to you in an earlier lecture one of the reasons so many East European countries were added to NATO in the 2004 and 2005 was the quid pro quo for their promise to participate in the Iraq invasion that I will be talking about next week.
So we can act unilaterally with allies that are willing to form coalitions with us. And we are not constrained either by alliances or by international institutions. Third, he asserted a right to engage in preemptive war. So the traditional justification of war was the existence of an imminent threat. Word imminent has a long history. It's partly connected to just war theory which says that an imminent threat is necessary for war to count as a just war.
And if you go back and actually read the NSC68, the statement of the Truman Doctrine in 1950, it asserts there that the US will never engage in preemptive war, that it's only going to act defensively. So very quickly the Bush administration said no, we are not going to be constrained by the doctrine of imminent threats. And they started talking about things like emerging threats, gathering threats would be sufficient to justify American military action. And of course, if you think about that doctrine, a doctrine of emerging threats, you then are almost inevitably also going to get away from the idea that we are only going to be involved in wars of existential survival.
We are going to be back in the world of optional wars because there's no clear sense in which emerging or gathering can be neatly calibrated or that you can convince your citizenry of the importance of an emerging or a gathering threat. That's part of what we have with global warming. It's a gathering threat. It's an emerging threat. It can't much harder to mobilize people for a chronic problem if you like than a crisis. So imminent war was thrown out of the window in favor of these notions of gathering, gathering threats, emerging threats, and so on.
Again, so we can engage in preemptive wars against emerging or gathering threats. In that Bush doctrine, as he articulated it first at West Point commencement address in June of 2002 and then reiterated it in the two national security statement doctrines that the Bush administration published for one later that year and then reaffirmed in 2006, they said a legitimate war aim was now regime change. A legitimate war aim was to get rid of an oppressive dictatorship. So completely out of the window the UN notion that international action is legitimate if its goal is to restore the status quo anti of international borders. But simply if a regime is sufficiently oppressive vis-a-vis its own population, this will be a justification for military action. And the reason they articulated this so early was they already had their eye on Iraq. It was very clear for reasons we'll get to next week that from the beginning the administration was committed to removing Saddam Hussein from power even before we had started the battle in Afghanistan.
A fifth element of the Bush doctrine was again a very radical departure which was that there's no possibility of neutrality. As he put it at the end of the clip I showed you, if you're not with us, you're with the terrorists. And of course there had been a long tradition of neutrality in international relations. If you go back to the US in the 19th century we had often asserted neutrality. And if you come even in the 20th century if you look at the run up to World War II Congress was passing neutrality legislation hand over fist to keep FDR out of the war with Germany in the late 1930s. There was a long tradition of the US asserting the right to be neutral in international conflicts and during the Cold War the non-aligned nations had declared themselves to be neutral in the conflict between the US and the Soviets. And once we get to the Bush doctrine all of that also goes out of the window. So essentially we're now declaring to the world that if you do not support us we will feel free to interpret that as support for our adversaries and we will act accordingly.
Finally the Bush doctrine as he indicated in that clip envisages if not permanent war a war that we can never really say has finally been won. We're declaring war on terror. Well there's been terrorism in the world since the beginning of time. And so the idea that you're now going to be on a war footing so long as there is terrorism in the world you're essentially saying the US economy is going to be on a permanent war footing. We're going to be engaging in what have since come to be called endless wars into the indefinite future. So some have said that the Bush doctrine was not that radical of an innovation but clearly it was. It was much more radical than anything that had gone before. Of course what it did was as it has played out and we'll see this in the next two lectures it completely rubbish his father's attempt to re-embed some notion of containment for a post-cold war era into international politics and it's one reason his father was very critical of him and of Cheney and of Rumsfeld if you like scuttling his legacy and this came out in a subsequent biography.
So in effect the Bush doctrine if you wanted a bumper sticker for it is roll back of all possible adversaries at any time and in any place. The US now asserts the right to do that. So it was about as radical an innovation as one could have come up with and certainly the most radical innovation in US national security policy in the history of the republic.
So now let's turn to the Afghan conflict. So one question is well why was al-Qaeda based in Afghanistan in the first place? Anybody know? Why were they there? We just they just popped up. So Osama bin Laden had a long and antagonistic history of not very good relations with his Saudi government. He was a Saudi Arabian citizen and he had become radicalized and had in the 1980s worked with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan helping them battle the Soviets and when the Soviet Union finally collapsed he had tried to mediate an end to the ongoing civil war in Afghanistan among the militias not with much success. He had then bounced around the Middle East and eventually wound up in Sudan and during the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein in that I was talking about some minutes ago he was strongly of the opinion that the Saudis first of all in that war part of the reason there was so much anxiety about the Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was people thought Saudi Arabia will be next and Saudi Arabia is a huge supply of oil to the west.
So both the Saudis themselves and others as part of the reason there was Arab participation in the coalition to get Saddam out of Kuwait. bin Laden said that on no account should the Saudis accept western participation in expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and if they did they would be inviting the infidel into the heart of the Middle East and they ignored him and then he kept up a steady stream of attacks on the Saudi regime in print and verbally and was increasingly suspected also of even financing terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia from his bases in Sudan and elsewhere that he moved around to and so the Saudis finally they first banished him from the country and then stripped up his Saudi citizenship and I think that was in 1994 they had stripped him of his citizenship and eventually they started putting pressure on Sudan to kick him out of Sudan because they thought he was and as did the Americans think he was using this as a base for mounting terrorist attacks which were ramping up over the 1990s and so finally the Saudis agreed and everybody agreed that they would leave him alone if he would go to Afghanistan and there was a sort of tacit acknowledgement that he would not forment terrorism within Saudi Arabia from that base but as al-Qaeda became increasingly radicalized we should remember that the two primary war aims were first to overthrow the Saudi regime and secondly to get the west out of the Middle East it was what they at that time called a defensive jihad rather than an offensive jihad which they have subsequently embraced so that's why it was in Afghanistan and that's why the the 9-11 attacks were plotted from Afghanistan he had good relations with the Taliban regime of Mullah Omar they had worked together there in the 1980s
an important thing to say about the Afghan war is we very early on made a decision to pursue regime change basically what happened was we went to the UN we said we got resolutions passed saying the Taliban must turn over Osama bin Laden and closed down the training camps they refused and we essentially said we're going to wipe you out we're going to take we're going to take over your regime but and here this is part of the reason I showed you the Rumsfeld clip at the beginning of the lecture it turns out that when Rumsfeld said we'll contract out everything except core military capacities that was not an accurate statement because the Bush administration was certainly not interested in growing the military indeed Rumsfeld was shrinking the military and they had no intention of changing that so they wanted to they wanted to attack Afghanistan and they wanted to do
it largely by contracting out not to military contractors as we talked about in the private organization lecture like that would come later but they thought the way to do this since Afghanistan was in the midst of a civil war the way to do this was to get behind one of the belligerents in the civil war and let them take over the country and then they will be a friendly regime and so the belligerent in question was a group called the Northern Alliance and the Northern Alliance was losing the war they they had been pushed into a small corner of the country and but for us involvement with them and support for them they would they would almost certainly have been defeated in relatively short order and so what we did was we got behind the Northern Alliance and supported them in the Afghan civil war which led then to the destruction of the regime which was in two important respects a set up for failure for two reasons one is a theoretical expectation maybe it's dressing it up too much to call it theoretical but at least one should have skeptical priors if you get behind the losing side in a civil war the odds are it's going to be very difficult for them to govern if you put them in power because one of the reasons they're losing side in a war is they probably don't have much grassroots support. on the ground and we will see this play out again in Libya and elsewhere in upcoming lectures
So there were good reasons for skepticism of the idea that this was a good way to put in a puppet government that would be friendly to the U.S. and be able to govern the country without massive infusions of support and of course nobody suspected nobody anticipated for a second that we would make sort of martial plan type of investments in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 so that the notion we were going to sustain the rebuilding of this country was not on anybody's scanner and indeed as we have subsequently tried to do it that has been a dramatic failure there was no post-war planning of any kind people were this was in the you know in the heat of the weeks off to 9-11 and the notion was that this horrific evil has been perpetrated against the United States and we are going to go there and take care of business I mean that was the dominant rhetoric behind this invasion
so one question to ask is well might there might we have done any of this differently was there a path not taken here clearly we you know as I said in the chapters I had you read today the idea of responding to 9-11 through the lens of the criminal justice system was a complete non-starter given the scale and scope the attacks and there was going to be a military response and it was also clearly the case that once the Taliban regime refused to be cooperative there was going to be military action well there was a path not taken advocated by some at the time and this is summarized by Lawrence Wilkinson who was Colin Powell's chief of staff in an interview in the Cairo review in in five years ago
he said the smart strategy and there were those who advocated at this at the time and he's correct about that you can find it in the archival evidence the the was to go in pound the hell out of al-Qaeda try to get bin Laden and his leadership if you didn't so be it you'd keep hunting you'd do it mostly with special ops forces and the CIA you would pound the Taliban a little bit and as you left you'd tell them do it again and we'll do it again this was a very formidable persuasive strategic brief and the president rejected it then he says in a rather mean aside well really the vice president rejected it because it was common knowledge that Cheney was really the brains behind and certainly the the energy behind the war as it was being fought so what would have been the advantages of such an approach essentially you would say to you would ignore the Taliban you would say we're we've been attacked by these people and we're going to go after them and we are going to destroy them and if you interfere with us good luck with that because well we will beat you up too and they need not have engaged in regime change particularly if you thinking about a world in which you're going to be acting with a light footprint and wanting to keep your forces available for deployment anywhere seems like it might be a way to go obviously first of all much cheaper vastly cheaper than replacing a regime you find you finance your operation and then when you leave your you leave with your operation
secondly it avoids the you break it you own it problem if you create a failed state you are then saddled with a failed state and you've got to administer a failed state or at least support some side that's trying to administer a failed state so we by by toppling the regime we took on a much bigger set of problems now some might say well but what about the costs in terms of deterrence that you want other players around the world to know that if they support terrorists or allow terrorists in their country they're going to be wiped out too and so that might have been some of the thinking but I suspect the real reasons it were not done first of all the rage after 9-11 the idea that in the weeks and months following that attack the notion that that mula armor's omar's regime was thumbing his their nose at the u.s was just too much to bear and too much politically to tolerate as well as hubris about what could be achieved in afghanistan and here you know we we we tend to repeat the mistakes of history you didn't have to go back to the 19th century and britains failed attempts to subdue afghanistan americans had watched in real time for a decade as the as the soviets had been ground down in the afghan mountains it's about the worst possible to reign in the world for military campaigns so it's not really surprising perhaps that we didn't pursue that path but it certainly there were people on the ground advocating it and it's something that we didn't do so what did we do apart from toppling the regime what did we do in going after bin Laden and what we did came to ahead in december in north east in syria in what uh you know in our north east afghanistan in the very high up in the mountains in a remote area called torobora
The battle of torobora which was conducted over the middle of december of 2001 and here's some commentary from a key player in that the battle of torobora following the strategy of keeping an afghan face on the war furies delta team joined the cia and afghan fighters and piled into pickup trucks they videotaped their journey to a place called torobora fury told us his orders were to kill bin laden and leave the body with the afghans right here you're looking at basically the battlefield from the last location that we had firm on a somber laws location this ridge line is at about 14,000 feet and back this way toward me is pakistan that's right on a scale of say one to ten 10 being the toughest how tough a position is this to attack in my experience it's a 10 delta developed an audacious plan to come at bin laden from the one direction he would never expect we want to come on the back door you were going to come up over the tops of the peaks that's right the original plan that we sent up to a higher headquarters delta force wants to come in over the mountain with oxygen coming from the pakistan side over the mountains and come in and get a drop on it bin laden from behind why didn't you do that disapproved at some level above us whether that was a central command or all the way up to the president of states i'm not sure
the next option delta wanted to employ was to drop hundreds of land mines in the mountain passes that led to pakistan bin laden's escape route first guy blows his leg off airway stops that allows aircraft overhead to find them they see all these heat sources out there okay there's a big large group of all kind of moving south they can engage that why didn't you do that disapproved why was it not approved i have no idea how often does delta come up with a tactical plan that's disapproved by higher headquarters in my experience in my five years of delta never before the military wouldn't tell us who rejected the plans or why fury wasn't happy about it but he pressed on with the only option he had left a frontal assault on bin laden's dug-in al-qaeda fighters the delta team had only about 50 men so the mission would depend on the afghan militia as guides and muscle their leader was a warlord a self-styled general named ali ali second from the left met with this cia officer and accepted millions of dollars in cash from the agency dressed like afghans the americans maneuvered up the mountains calling in airstrikes on al-qaeda by day they would advance but at night they soon discovered that their afghan allies went home well i have to assume that if you started up the hills of torbora and and the mojo hadeen took territory they didn't abandon that at night oh yes they did they gave it up to the enemy absolutely mojo dean would go up get into a skirmish firefight lose a guy or two maybe kill an al-qaeda or two and then they leave it was almost like it was an agreement and understanding between the two forces fighting each other almost put on a good show and then leave in the morning bin laden was on the radio the cia delta and their afghan allies were listening how did the afghans react when they heard from ossama bin laden on the radio as some bin laden is many a muslims hero these guys in my opinion were more in awe of a son bin laden than they were willing to kill him when they heard him talking on the radio they would gather around the individual to hell that handheld transistor he would hold it up in the air almost as if he didn't want
the connection to break almost like they could see the ries line with some laden happen to be talking from like they could almost see him and feel his presence and they just stood there with wide eyes and somebody in awe that here is a leader of the jahad the leader of al-qaeda and they're actually hearing his voice over the radio and these were the men who were supposed to help you capture or killing some allies and then something extraordinary happened furies afghan allies announced that they had negotiated a ceasefire with al-qaeda something the americans had no interest in when furies team advanced anyway his afghan partners drew their weapons on delta it took 12 hours to end the bogus ceasefire precious time for al-qaeda to move you got to figure he's heading for the valley and the past in depacistan or assumption as he's going for the valley at that time bin laden had changed direction and the tone of his radio calls clearly under dress clearly hurting clearly caring for his men inside this building the american team listened to bin laden on the radio fury wrote down the translation in a notebook quote our prayers were not answered times are dire and bad we did not get support from the apostates who are brothers i'm sorry for bringing you here it is okay to surrender in quote when you heard that what did you think i thought it's almost over so dalton fury is the pen name uh he is book he is a book i said several books called to kill done laden he was the major in charge of the delta forces uh in in the afghan operation um and you can read his book if you want the the detailed account but but basically what happened at torah bora has been much in dispute um an important document which gives a lot of the blow by blow is this uh senate report uh foreign relations senate report published in 2009 um which which documents a lot of uh what fury uh said in in that clip and that basically um you know that the u.s it's not the only thing by the way there's a some might be skeptical of this if you see who is chairman of the committee at that time and he had failed in his 2004 bid to unseat george w bush no he was not involved in writing this report but uh another around the same time an academic um an academic uh you can read this abstract uh at your leisure when i post the slides basically they said there there was an alternative path not taken uh not just the two strategies that um fury was suggesting of feeding up the the command that didn't want to hear him but that there were um even within the sailing of ten thousand troops um even within that ceiling there were battle plans to to go into the mountains and at least seal off the um seal off the escape to pakistan um and they didn't do it uh instead there was a lot of hand ringing about whether first of all they were there were claims that we didn't know he was there for sure which turned out to be false the cia didn't know that he was there for sure um and then they thought that maybe he had been killed and they spent some time digging up for bodies but uh he hadn't been killed um and so the the the strategy had essentially been to rely upon these um militias who uh whose loyalty was very much in question and of course we shouldn't be surprised by that not only for the reasons dalton fury gave in that video that they might have had much stronger allegiance many of those people to bin Laden uh then to the prospect of killing him um but also because um we know from the literature on civil wars uh here the the state of the artist status calibis's work uh used to be at Yale now at oxford but um civil wars are never just about ethnic conflicts they're all kinds of other local uh interests served and as we saw in the host nation trucking case we talked about some time ago people are being paid and and making money in these kinds of settings and so it's it's very unlikely that you're going to be able in a setting like this to um outsource the fighting against somebody like bin Laden um so what explains the american strategy well one is that we wanted to keep the troops to a minimum um as i said there were there have been subsequent studies done um both by the senate uh foreign relations committee
and uh academic studies which should make it believable uh at least obviously there's always risk in any military operation but there certainly could there was a colorable case that the u.s could have gone in uh with troops that were in the region and prevented bin Laden's escape um it seems like a principal reason was that uh the the what has become uh so important in american uh wars abroad they wanted to keep uh the number of u.s. casualties to a minimum so as you saw there were only some 50 delta force people up there in the mountains working with the afghans they did not want american uh to start hearing about uh dead soldiers in afghanistan but then secondly it is it is also clear from that report that that they were already in december of 2001 president bush was asking um rumsfeld for a battle plan to go into iraq uh and remove sadam who's saying from power and they did not want to get a lot of american troops embroiled in any kind of conflict in afghanistan um so the thought was they were going to be redeploying whatever assets they had in afghanistan as soon as possible to iraq
now you might think about well what were the costs of this strategy um one was the obvious you know immediate costs that bin Laden and al-qaeda escaped through the mountains to pakistan which gave them a huge propaganda victory against the u.s that the most powerful nation on earth in fact couldn't chase down this terrorist group in the mountains afghansan um but secondly also because we had such a weak footprint actually mula umar himself escaped on a motor bicycle motorcycle uh from uh uh from afghanistan uh into uh pakistan and would come to lead the taliban insurgency uh to retake the country uh from the the new uh regime in konda haw so much so that within a year uh american generals on the ground were saying up the chain of command uh you should negotiate a deal with the taliban because um the new regime's not going to be able to survive and here we are uh 18 years later and I believe we're on the verge of doing that but they're what i was saying is as early as 2002 um and finally I think that what the afghan operation did do uh though it's going to was going to take some time for this to become clearer it it made it obvious that the gap between the aspirations for and the capacities behind the bush doctrine were becoming that should say doctrine on that slide the bush doctrine were coming clearly into view because if you think about the massive expansion of breach that we proclaim you know we're white we're which preemptive wars against gathering threats anywhere on the world at any time uh with with uh any allies uh at the same time as with shrinking our military capacities extremely unwilling to get american soldiers killed uh and wanting to work through pro proxies that this is not going to end well it didn't end well in afghanistan and uh next tuesday we'll see how it ended in iraq. see you then thank you