“The Return of the Taliban” book event with Hassan Abbass, New America ONLINE

[ONLINE] – The Return of the Taliban
Afghanistan After the Americans Left
EVENT

Since the fall of Kabul in August, 2021, the Taliban have held effective control of Afghanistan—a scenario few Western commentators anticipated. Yet reestablishing control after a twenty-year-long bitter war against the Republic of Afghanistan poses a complex challenge. The Taliban is now facing debilitating threats—from humanitarian crises to the Islamic State in Khorasan—but also engaging on the world stage, particularly with China and central Asian states. What is the Taliban’s strategy now that they’ve returned to power? In his new book The Return of the Taliban, National Defense University Professor and former New America fellow Hassan Abbas examines the resurgent Taliban, profiles its key leaders, and provides an important look at conditions in Afghanistan today.

Join New America’s International Security Program for a discussion of the Taliban and Afghanistan after America. To discuss this topic, New America welcomes Hassan Abbas, author of The Return of the Taliban and Distinguished Professor of International Relations at the Near East South Asia Strategic Studies Center, National Defense University. He was a 2017 Carnegie Fellow and a 2018 Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, and is the author of numerous books, including The Taliban Revival and The Prophet’s Heir.

Join the conversation online using #TalibanReturn and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANT

Hassan Abbas, @Watandost
Distinguished Professor of IR, National Defense University
Former New America Fellow

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Center on the Future of War, ASU
Professor of Practice, ASU
Co-Editor, Talibanistan

Why Biden’s promises on democracy ring a little hollow, CNN.com

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/28/opinions/afghanistan-democracy-biden-questions-bergen/index.html

Opinion: Why Biden’s support for democracy rings a little hollow
Opinion by Peter Bergen

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN. View more opinion on CNN.

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden is hosting a “Summit for Democracy” in Washington, DC. Obviously, the Taliban, the de facto government that rules Afghanistan today, won’t be attending this summit.

This makes the premise of the democracy summit ring somewhat hollow because while the Biden administration does an excellent job of trumpeting its commitments to democracy and women’s rights, only a year and a half ago, it cavalierly abandoned 40 million Afghans to the Taliban’s misogynistic theocracy.

As Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, President Biden said that Afghans didn’t fight to save their own country. Was this accurate? In fact, an estimated 66,000 Afghan soldiers and policemen died fighting the Taliban during the course of the war.

In August 2021, the last US soldiers left Afghanistan, ending America’s longest war. Their botched withdrawal was the final unhappy chapter of the two decades of the United States’ war in Afghanistan.

Will Americans learn anything from their mistakes and successes in Afghanistan? House Republicans, who are, of course, in the majority in the US Congress, are already holding hearings about the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan during the first year of the Biden administration.

Some House Republicans are even advocating for impeachment proceedings against Biden, partly because of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which 13 American service personnel were killed at Kabul Airport by an ISIS suicide bomber, and at least 170 Afghans also died in the attack.

Of course, any examination of the US record in Afghanistan is something of a double-edged sword for Republicans since it was the Trump administration that signed the agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that set the stage for the total US withdrawal from Afghanistan. And the House committee investigating the January 6th attack on Congress also uncovered evidence that then-President Donald Trump planned to order all US troops out of Afghanistan just days before he left office. However, that order wasn’t carried out.

In addition to the Congressional hearings already underway, there is also an independent, congressionally mandated bipartisan Afghanistan War commission that has been formed to examine the two decades of the conflict. The commission comprises 16 experts, who worked in the US government, media and think tanks focusing on Afghanistan or related subjects.

Blinken subpoenaed by top Republican investigating Biden administration withdrawal from Afghanistan
This commission is desperately needed as history suggests that as much as Americans might want to put Afghanistan in the rear-view mirror — just as they did with the Vietnam War — overseas wars will continue to be part of the American story in the future.

The establishment of the Afghan War commission is significant because there was never a comprehensive examination of the conduct of the Iraq War by the US government as there was in the United Kingdom with the British Chilcot Inquiry. That inquiry generated a massive 6,000-page report that examined every aspect of Britain’s role in the Iraq war. (The US Army history of the Iraq war published in 2019 is authoritative but was necessarily focused on the military history of the conflict.)

There are many useful policy lessons to be learned from the US project in Afghanistan and how this avoidable tragedy unfolded. Below are 31 questions that the Congressional hearings examining the Afghan conflict and the Afghan War commission might try to answer.

These questions are grouped into five thematic areas: the early decision-making in the years after the fall of the Taliban and how it impacted the conflict; the nature of the US military challenges in Afghanistan; the political issues that made Afghanistan a challenging country to govern; the background around the withdrawal deal that the Trump administration inked with the Taliban in 2020, which the Biden administration then followed through on, and how the final chaotic US withdrawal in the summer of 2021 then played out.

Early Years

1. Just months after the 9/11 attacks at the battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan in December 2001, the leaders of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, were surrounded by Afghan fighters and a small number of US Special Forces and CIA personnel. How did the leaders of al Qaeda slip away to fight another day? And to what extent did this give the terrorist group another lease on life?

2. Did the December 2001 Bonn Agreement made between several anti-Taliban factions after the fall of the Taliban undermine the future Afghan government by imposing a centralized, top-down presidential structure on a country that has always been ruled in a decentralized manner?

3. Was there a moment in 2002 when a more just and lasting peace might have been reached with the Taliban when they were utterly defeated and some of their leaders were seeking a peace deal and possible integration into the Afghan political system?

4. To what extent did the 2003 Iraq War drain US military and intelligence resources and White House attention away from Afghanistan?

Military Challenges

5. What were the weaknesses of the Afghan army? And were some of those weaknesses, in part, the result of trying to mold that army into a US-style military?

6. Taliban leaders often lived in the safe haven of neighboring Pakistan, while the Taliban also recruited suicide bombers from Pakistani madrassas. Safe havens are often the key to success for insurgent groups, according to a 2001 RAND study of the issue. How important was the role of the Pakistani haven in the regrouping of the Taliban?

7. Pakistan has fought three major wars with India on its eastern border, so it has always wanted a pro-Pakistani Afghan government on its western border. Hence the Pakistani military doctrine known as “strategic depth,” which helps to explain Pakistan’s support for the Taliban. Given this fact, did the US ever have real policy options to reduce Pakistan’s support for the Taliban?

8. What were the sources of Taliban strength? Opposition to American and allied troops that were seen as “infidel” invaders? Anger at the corruption of the Afghan government and police? The Taliban’s control of the lucrative opium trade? Some combination of all of these?

Members of, A company, The Highlanders, 4th Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, (4 SCOTS) on a Patrol from Patrol Base Attal in Afghanistan. (Photo by Danny Lawson/PA Images via Getty Images)
Independent probe into alleged extrajudicial killings in Afghanistan by British military begins
9. Between 2016 and 2020, more than two thousand Afghan civilians were killed in US or Afghan airstrikes, according to one analysis of UN data. How important were Afghan civilian casualties in fueling support for the Taliban?

10. How successful was the CIA drone program against al-Qaeda in Pakistan? The drones certainly decimated the leadership of al Qaeda. Still, they also engendered great Pakistani resentment against the US, particularly when the drone program was at its height during the Obama administration. This complicated US efforts to ally with the Pakistanis to fight jihadist groups based in Pakistan.

11. During the first year of the Obama administration in 2009, why was there a shift to a much larger mission that involved surging tens of thousands more US troops into Afghanistan? And how critical was the success of the “surge” of US troops in Iraq in 2008 in affecting military advice to President Obama about what to do in Afghanistan?

Political Issues

12. Widespread corruption was corrosive to the legitimacy of the Afghan government. Was that the key failure on the Afghan government side?

13. Flawed presidential elections produced flawed Afghan governments. How culpable were Afghanistan’s leaders like presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani for what transpired in Afghanistan?

14. How damaging was the consistent US inconsistency about its Afghan policies during the two decades after 9/11, since most US diplomats and soldiers in Afghanistan served only one-year tours so they were typically reinventing the wheel on each rotation?

15. In all the discussion of the mistakes made in Afghanistan, sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of what went right in Afghanistan. In addition to the rise of independent media and the provision of education to girls and jobs for women, what else worked? Programs like the National Solidarity Programme, which offered small grants for public works to local communities in consultation with those communities?

The Withdrawal Agreement

16. Beginning with a speech by President Barack Obama in December 2009, the US started publicly announcing its plans to withdraw from Afghanistan. How important was the constant public discussion of the US withdrawals in undercutting the Afghan government?

17. How crucial was President Donald Trump’s also constant trumpeting of his planned withdrawal of US troops in undermining the Afghan government?

18. Why did Biden go through with the Trump agreement with the Taliban, even though the Taliban were observing almost none of the terms of the deal and his military advisers were warning that a total withdrawal would result in the collapse of the Afghan army and government?

19. In May 2021, the chief American negotiator with the Taliban, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, testified before a US congressional committee that anyone who thought that the Taliban would take over Afghanistan was “mistaken.” Khalilzad also asserted that the Taliban wanted normal relations with the rest of the world so that would positively affect their behavior. Why was he so wrong?

20. Did the Taliban win at the negotiating table from the Americans what they couldn’t win on the battlefield from them?

21. How vital was the exclusion of the elected Afghan government from the US-Taliban negotiations in undermining the government’s legitimacy?

22. In 2021, there were only 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan who were mostly serving as advisers to the Afghan military. Could there have been a politically sustainable policy for the U.S. to remain in Afghanistan? (The US has more than 25,000 troops today in South Korea, seven decades after the end of the Korean war.)

23. Might a US military policy of “go light, go long” have had the best chance of success in Afghanistan since it likely would have been more sustainable politically in the US and it would have reduced the visibility of the American military presence in Afghanistan?

24. To what extent did Biden’s experiences as vice president during the 2009 policy debates in the Obama administration about Afghanistan affect the outcome of Biden’s 2021 Afghanistan decision? In 2009 Biden was opposed to the Pentagon wanting to surge tens of thousands of US troops into Afghanistan, a debate that Biden lost. Did the scars from that debate help to inform Biden’s decision in 2021 to withdraw entirely from Afghanistan, despite the opposition of the Pentagon brass?

25. Did the Taliban ever really separate from al-Qaeda?

The Withdrawal

26. What were the key decision points during the withdrawal ordered by Biden – for instance, the closing of the massive Bagram Air Base near Kabul – and how did these decisions affect the calculus of the Afghan military and government?

27. Why did the Biden team reportedly ignore a “dissent” cable from State Department officials serving in Afghanistan in July 2021 that sounded the alarm about the deteriorating situation there? (The Republican head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul subpoenaed that cable on Tuesday.)

28. Why did the White House only convene its first high-level meeting on August 14, 2021, to discuss evacuation just hours before Kabul fell, according to a Congressional investigation by Senate Republicans?

29. How critical was President Ghani’s sudden departure from Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, to the collapse of the Afghan government?

30. Why were so many American allies left behind in Afghanistan? The Association of Wartime Allies, an advocacy group for Afghans who had worked for the US, estimated that only about 3% of the 81,000 Afghans who had worked for the US government and had applied for special visas, made it out of Afghanistan, leaving 78,000 behind.

31. Did the ignominious US withdrawal from Afghanistan affect Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to move an army to the Ukraine border three months later?

Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) 20 Years Later, ASU ONLINE

Join the Center on the Future of War for an event with Co-Director Peter Bergen to discuss Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) 20 Years Later.

This is part of a series of events featuring faculty from the ASU Online M.A. in Global Security (MAGS) at Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies.

Peter Bergen is a journalist, documentary producer, vice president for global studies & fellows at New America, CNN national security analyst, professor of practice at Arizona State University, where he co-directs the Center on the Future of War and the author or editor of ten books, three of which were New York Times bestsellers and four of which were named among the best non-fiction books of the year by The Washington Post. The books have been translated into twenty-four languages. Documentaries based on his books have been nominated for two Emmys and won the Emmy for best documentary.

For more information contact:
ASU Center on the Future of War
School of Political Science and Global Studies
hruzbas@asu.edu
https://futureofwar.asu.edu/

Was toppling Saddam Hussein worth it? The answer isn’t straightforward, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq
CNN
—
Two decades ago, on March 19, 2003, then-President George W. Bush ordered the US invasion of Iraq. A week later, near Najaf, a city in southern Iraq, then-US Major General David Petraeus turned to the American journalist Rick Atkinson and asked him a simple question: “Tell me how this ends.” That remains an excellent question.

The Amna Suraka Museum, which was once a prison and torture site used by dictator Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agents in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, is a good place to try to contemplate the legacy of the US invasion and, perhaps, an ancillary question: Was it all worth it?

When I visited the former prison earlier this week, I found it located in a pleasant residential neighborhood in Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The location of the prison in the middle of the city was not an accident: Saddam wanted the local population to know what awaited anyone who opposed him, or those who might even be thinking about opposing his regime.

The museum is a chamber of horrors showcasing the cells where prisoners were tortured by electrical shocks and had the soles of their feet beaten so they couldn’t walk. Juveniles were brought to the detention center and their ages were changed to be more than 18 so they could be “legally” executed, according to a museum official I spoke to.

The prison cells are each quite small, with almost no light. During Saddam’s era, they were packed with prisoners who shared overflowing toilets.

In the museum, there is a long corridor – known as the “Hall of Mirrors” – consisting of fragments of glass that represent each of the 182,000 people Saddam’s men killed during his 1988 “Anfal” campaign (which is the estimated total number of deaths made by Kurdish officials). Small twinkling lights on the ceiling represent the 4,500 villages in the region that Saddam’s forces also destroyed.

One of the 20th century’s worst tyrants
Three and half decades ago this week, on March 16, 1988, Saddam conducted one of the most notorious crimes of his murderous dictatorship, killing thousands of Kurds using poison gas and nerve agents.

There is little question Saddam was one of the worst tyrants of the 20th century. He killed as many as 290,000 of his own people, according to Human Rights Watch. He also launched wars against two of his neighbors – Iran during the 1980s and Kuwait in 1990. Conservative estimates suggest that at least half a million people were killed during these wars.

So, when Saddam was toppled by the Americans two decades ago, at least some Iraqis were happy. And Iraq today has made some strides to a more accountable political system compared to its neighbors in the Middle East. Iraq has held several elections since the US invasion in 2003 that were followed by peaceful transfers of power.

And yet, after Saddam was toppled by the US, the incompetent American occupation of Iraq contributed to a civil war that tore the country apart, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. More than 4,500 US soldiers also died. The war also gave al Qaeda a new lease of life. The group known as al Qaeda in Iraq later morphed into ISIS, which seized vast amounts of Iraqi territory in 2014 and instituted a reign of terror.

Uncomfortable similarities with Russia’s invasion today

The Iraq War also set a precedent for unprovoked wars that we see playing out in Ukraine today, which the Russians are already using to good effect. At a conference in India earlier this month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called out what he termed a US “double standard” saying: “[You] believe that the United States has the right to declare a threat to its national interest, any place on earth, like they did… in Iraq?”

This message may not resonate much in the West, but it does in the Global South where the US-Iraq War and the Russian war in Ukraine are seen by many as wars of choice rather than of necessity.

Of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s’ conduct of the war in Ukraine is orders of magnitude more brutal than the American war in Iraq. Also, Putin’s forces are attacking a democratic state, while, in Iraq, Bush ordered an invasion that toppled a dictatorship.

That said, it’s worth underlining some of the wars’ similarities: Both wars were started because of false claims – the US war in Iraq was launched on the basis that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and links to al Qaeda. The US media mostly parroted those claims. As a result, months before the US invaded Iraq, most Americans believed that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks even though there was no evidence for this.

Putin justifies his war in Ukraine by claiming that it isn’t a “real” country and should be subsumed into Russia. Meanwhile, Russian media asserts that its soldiers are fighting “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine. Despite these false claims, most Russians support the war, according to independent polls.

Also, neither the Iraq War nor the war in Ukraine have had much in the way of international support. Unlike the case of the US-led war in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, which had a mandate from the UN Security Council, neither the US invasion of Iraq, nor the Russian invasion of Ukraine had UN Security Council backing.

Where next for Iraq?

In the museum dedicated to Saddam’s crimes against his own people, you feel the weight of his brutality. The US getting rid of Saddam was for many Iraqis something to be celebrated, but what followed, from the civil war to the rise and fall of ISIS, has inflicted additional great suffering on the Iraqi people.

To those who say: “Was it all worth it, toppling Saddam given what we know about how the last two decades played out?”, that may be missing the point today. Iraq has a new government and sits on the third largest oil reserves in the world. It should be one of the richest countries in the Middle East, but instead the cancer of endemic corruption has eaten away at government intuitions and international companies are often hesitant to invest in Iraq.

The 2,500 US troops that remain in Iraq today provide not just help to the Iraqi military, but also make a political statement that the United States plans to stay engaged in Iraq for the foreseeable future – rather than abandoning the country as it did in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, when all remaining US troops were pulled out.

And we saw how well that turned out.

‘At my first meeting with Saddam Hussein, within 30 seconds, he knew two things about me,’ says FBI interrogator, CNN.com

Opinion: ‘At my first meeting with Saddam Hussein, within 30 seconds, he knew two things about me,’ says FBI interrogator
Peter Bergen
Opinion by Peter Bergen
Updated 9:51 AM EDT, Tue March 14, 2023

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on
Two decades ago, on March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the US invasion of Iraq. Bush and senior administration officials had repeatedly told Americans that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction and that he was in league with al Qaeda.

These claims resulted in most Americans believing that Saddam was involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks. A year after 9/11, two-thirds of Americans said that the Iraqi leader had helped the terrorists, according to Pew Research Center polling, even though there was not a shred of convincing evidence for this. Nor did he have the WMD alleged by US officials.

US and UK forces defeated Saddam’s troops within weeks, but an insurgency sprang up against the invaders, which persisted for years. On December 13, 2003, US Special Operations Forces found Saddam hiding in a one-man-size hole in northern Iraq.

The FBI decided that George Piro, a Lebanese American special agent in his mid-30s who spoke Arabic, was the right person to interrogate Saddam. Piro’s work ethic was impressive: He would arrive at the FBI gym in downtown Washington, DC, at 6 a.m. for a workout, so he could start on the job at 7 a.m. at his office, which was lined with Middle Eastern history books.

The stakes could not have been higher for the FBI. Piro was under tremendous pressure to find out from Saddam the truth about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and purported ties to al Qaeda. CIA Director George Tenet had famously told Bush that the case that Saddam had WMD was a “slam dunk.”

Ukrainian servicemen fire an anti-aircraft gun towards Russian positions on a frontline near the town of Bakhmut, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Donetsk region, Ukraine January 15, 2023. REUTERS/Oleksandr Ratushniak
Gen. David Petraeus: How the war in Ukraine will end
The Iraq War was also sold to Americans as a “cakewalk.” Instead, hundreds of American soldiers had already been killed in Iraq by the time of Saddam’s arrest.

The CIA first questioned Saddam. And then over a period of seven months, Piro talked to him for many hours a day, with no one else allowed in the interrogation room. He discovered from the Iraqi dictator that no WMD existed and that Saddam only had contempt for Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda.

The dictator’s discussions with Piro confirmed that the Iraq War was America’s original sin during the dawn of the 21st century — a war fought under false assumptions, a conflict that killed thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

The war also damaged America’s standing in the world and the credibility of the US government among its citizens. Even the official US Army history of Iraq concluded that the real winner of the war in Iraq wasn’t America. It was … Iran.

After interrogating Saddam, Piro ascended to high-ranking positions at the FBI, retiring in July as the special agent in charge of the Miami field office. Now he is writing a book about his lengthy interrogations of the Iraqi dictator for Simon & Schuster.

As the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War approaches, I spoke to Piro about what some consider the most successful interrogation in FBI history and the aftershocks of the US invasion of Iraq, which are still being felt today.

Our conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

Peter Bergen: Tell me how this all started.

George Piro: I received a call on Christmas Eve, at about 5 o’clock in the evening, from a senior executive in the Counterterrorism Division. And he informed me that I had just been selected to interrogate Saddam Hussein on behalf of the FBI.

Bergen: What was your reaction?

Piro: Panic. Initially — I’ll be honest — it was terrifying to know that now I was going to be interrogating somebody that was on the world stage for so many years. It seemed such a significant responsibility on behalf of the FBI. I went to Barnes & Noble and bought two books on Saddam Hussein so I could start improving my understanding of who he was and all the things that were going to be important in developing an interrogation strategy.

I had already been to Iraq once, the first element of FBI personnel to deploy, and I had begun to develop an understanding of Iraqi culture and the Baath Party, which was led by Saddam.

Saddam was born on April 28, 1937, in a small village called al-Ajwa (near Tikrit). He had an extremely tough childhood as he did not have a father, and his mother married his uncle, who became his stepfather. Growing up, Saddam and his family were very poor, and initially, he was unable to attend school, but that childhood shaped the man Saddam became.

His childhood instilled in him a deep desire to prove everyone wrong about him and not to trust anyone, but to rely solely on his instincts. As a young man, he joined the Baath Party, and one of his early assignments was to assassinate the then-prime minister. The assassination attempt failed, and Saddam was forced to flee Iraq. But upon his return, he was seen as a tough guy, an image he would promote throughout his career.

Saddam, here in the Iraqi capital in 1983, projected a tough guy image throughout his career.
Saddam, here in the Iraqi capital in 1983, projected a tough guy image throughout his career.
Pierre Perrin/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
At my first meeting with Saddam, within 30 seconds, he knew two things about me. I told him my name was George Piro and that I was in charge, and he immediately said, “You’re Lebanese.” I told him my parents were Lebanese, and then he said, “You’re Christian.” I asked him if that was a problem, and he said absolutely not. He loved the Lebanese people. Lebanese people loved him. And I was like, “Well, great. We’re going to get along wonderfully.” (Saddam was a Sunni Muslim, while most Iraqis are Shia Muslims.)

Bergen: How long were you with Saddam? And, of course, you’re communicating in Arabic throughout, right?

Piro: About seven months. Initially, I would see him in the mornings. I would translate for his medical staff. And then, the formal interrogations were once or twice a week for several hours. As time went on, I started to spend more and more one-on-one time with him because I could communicate directly and very quickly with him. I built that to about five to seven hours every single day, one-on-one, a couple of hours in the morning, a couple of hours in the afternoon and then a formal interrogation session or two a week.

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein chastises the court moments after his half brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, was forcibly removed from their trial held in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, 29 January, 2006.

And we talked about everything. So especially in the first couple of months, my goal was just to get him to talk. I wanted to know what he valued in life and what his likes, dislikes and thought processes were. So we talked about everything from history, art, sports to politics. We would talk about things that I knew he wouldn’t have any reservations or hesitations to talk about.

People have asked me about the first interrogation I did of Saddam, saying, “What was the topic?” The majority of that first discussion was about his published novel because I knew he wasn’t going to lie about that. And I had researched and studied the book.

Bergen: Was it a good novel?

Piro: No, it was a terrible novel, “Zabiba and the King.”

Bergen: What was the plot?

Piro: So Zabiba was a beautiful Arab woman, and she was married to a horrible old man. Of course, Zabiba represented Iraq. The old man represented the United States. The king, handsome and dashing, rescued Zabiba from her misery, and they lived happily ever after. Of course, you can imagine who the king was. …

A key thing that can enhance the outcome of an interrogation is subject matter expertise. It’s extremely difficult to lie to a subject matter expert. Now, when you add that with a good interrogation strategy and approach, you are really increasing your likelihood of success with an interrogation. As an FBI agent and especially as an interrogator, I knew I wanted to know everything I could about Saddam because inconsistencies are indications of deception.

Piro, right, with Todd Irinaga, a fellow FBI agent, in 2003. Piro questioned Saddam over seven months.
Piro, right, with Todd Irinaga, a fellow FBI agent, in 2003. Piro questioned Saddam over seven months.
Courtesy George Piro
I wanted to understand Saddam and know Saddam as well as he knew himself. To give you an example: Saddam’s decision to invade Kuwait in 1990. I interviewed all the other “high-value detainees,” and we specifically talked about that decision. And there was a critical meeting where Saddam decided to invade Kuwait. I knew where everyone sat in the conference room, what Saddam did, where he even placed his gun belt, and how he positioned it.

So, when I was speaking to him, I would bring up those little details to reinforce how knowledgeable I was and how difficult it would be to misrepresent or lie about facts. It puts a tremendous amount of stress on the detainee when they are facing a subject matter expert because they must think so hard to develop any kind of lie that has a chance of maybe succeeding.

Bergen: At this time, the CIA was running its “coercive interrogation program.” Were you cognizant of this parallel interrogation program, or you found out about it later? And what did you think about it?

Piro: I found out about it later, and of course, I’ve never used “enhanced interrogation techniques,” as they’re referred to. They’re against the US Constitution, against FBI policy, and it goes really against the core values of the FBI. So, for me, it was never really an option because I’ve never used them, don’t know how to use them, nor would I want to. I feel it goes against who we are as a country and what we represent.

What was to my advantage, I was told by the FBI’s assistant director, Counterterrorism Division, “Be prepared to spend a year with Saddam Hussein.” So, I didn’t have to rush through the process. The intelligence value of the information that we wanted from Saddam didn’t diminish over time. It was as valuable whether we got it on Day One or Day 365. It was about getting it. It’s different than when you’re interrogating a terrorist, and there’s a threat or a plot, and you’re under a clock, and your goal is to prevent an attack. So, of course, your approach is going to be different.

What we wanted to know was buried in Saddam’s head, and it was strategic. And it was getting him to share that. So, developing an effective long-term interrogation strategy was really the key.

Bergen: After 9/11, many Americans believed that Saddam was personally involved in 9/11. Did he talk about it?

Piro: As you recall, prior to the invasion of Iraq, there were officials within the Department of Defense that had claimed that Iraq was operationally involved in 9/11, and we had to determine whether that was factual or not. That was our second-highest priority. Our first one was Iraq’s WMD program. Second was the extent of the relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq.

Saddam told me that he didn’t like Osama bin Laden and that he didn’t believe in al Qaeda’s ideology because it aimed to create an Islamic state throughout the Arab world. Well, Saddam had no desire to turn over power or relinquish anything to someone else. Saddam would joke about Osama bin Laden, saying, “You really can’t trust anybody with a beard like that.”

The other Iraqi detainees confirmed that there was no operational relationship with al Qaeda. I would describe it, at best, as an arms-length relationship. Saddam told me it was imperative to find out what al Qaeda was focused on, and then if he could manipulate them, that would be an added benefit.

Bergen: Saddam was a secularist, right?

Piro: Saddam wanted to be considered one of the greatest Arab Muslim leaders in history. In his mind, he was the third greatest warrior in Arab Muslim history.

Bergen: Up there with Saladin?

Piro: Yes. It was the Prophet Mohammed; No. 2, Saladin; and then he’s No. 3. So, for Saddam to be recognized as that kind of great leader and warrior, he had to be seen as religious. But he was very secular. He promoted Arab nationalism versus the Islamist perspective. He was more focused on the Arab aspect of Iraq versus the Islamic aspect of Iraq.

Saddam considered himself the third greatest warrior in Arab Muslim history, according to Piro.
Saddam considered himself the third greatest warrior in Arab Muslim history, according to Piro.
Faleh Kheiber/Reuters
Bergen: Tariq Aziz, his foreign minister, was a Christian, right?

Piro: Yes. Tariq Aziz was his deputy prime minister, at one point, and his minister of foreign affairs. He was Chaldean, which is Catholic, and Saddam never forced him to convert or anything like that. Most of his staff in his palaces and presidential sites were Christian.

Bergen: Weapons of mass destruction: How did that come up, and what did he say?

Piro: When I was selected to interrogate Saddam, I went over to the CIA at Langley (Virginia). I met with officials from the agency, especially those focused on Iraq and Saddam. I was allowed to review previous reports of Saddam’s CIA debriefings, and it was very evident to me that Saddam was very reluctant and unwilling to talk about WMD and al Qaeda, especially initially. He was very guarded.

So, for me, I wasn’t going to bring up WMD or al Qaeda until I felt Saddam could be honest, forthcoming and willing to discuss the topic. It didn’t make any sense to bring up something when you know he won’t want to provide truthful answers or engage in the topic.

We put the WMD and (al Qaeda) questions aside, and the initial focus was developing rapport that was going to be critical as time went on and when it was going to be necessary to bring up those difficult or sensitive topics.

On his 67th birthday, while he was in prison and I was interrogating him, the Iraqi people had the opportunity to show not only the world, but more importantly to him, how they truly felt about him. And they did. And it was overwhelming hatred.

The Iraqis were celebrating not being forced to celebrate Saddam’s birthday, and that day, he saw that on TV. And it took a significant emotional toll on him, and all day, that affected him. It made him depressed, and at the end of the day, the only people who cared that it was his birthday and took time to really recognize it were agents of the FBI.

My mom made some homemade cookies, and I brought them to him. We had tea.

It picked up his spirits, and that was part of the process for consistently looking for different ways to strengthen that rapport because there did come a time when he said, “I don’t want to answer any questions,” but then he goes, “But I still want to talk to you.” And it got to the point where I was able to say to him, “Listen, if you don’t want to tell me something, that’s fine, but don’t lie to me. It’s disrespectful.”

So, when it came to WMD, I didn’t bring it up until about five or so months into the interrogation.

Bergen: And what did he tell you?

Piro: So, what he told me was that, of course, Iraq did not have the WMD that we suspected he had; Saddam had given a critical speech in June of 2000, which was a speech where he said that Iraq had WMD, and a lot of people wanted to know why — if he didn’t have WMD, why did he give that speech? So they wanted me to ask him about the speech, and I looked for a way or an opportunity to bring up the topic and be able to have a candid conversation with him about the speech without him realizing I was interrogating him about WMD.

And when he told me about that speech, his biggest enemy wasn’t the United States or Israel. His biggest enemy was Iran, and he told me he was constantly trying to balance or compete with Iran. Saddam’s biggest fear was that if Iran discovered how weak and vulnerable Iraq had become, nothing would prevent them from invading and taking southern Iraq. So, his goal was to keep Iran at bay.

Bergen: In that period before the US invasion, he was posturing that he had WMD or being ambiguous about it to deter the Iranians from invading Iraq. Is that what you’re saying?

Piro: Absolutely. Because that was his most significant threat. It wasn’t the United States. It was Iran, and he was purposely being misleading or kind of ambiguous about it. If you recall before the war, every intelligence agency around the world had come to the same conclusion that Iraq had WMD because of Saddam’s posturing, some of his vague statements and his prior history of using chemical and biological weapons against his people and also developing a nuclear weapons research program. And that worked to his advantage when it came to Iran.

Bergen: And, of course, during the 1980s Iraq and Iran had fought a nearly 8-year-long war in which hundreds of thousands died on both sides. So that was keeping him up at night, even more than the Americans, right?

Piro: Absolutely. Because if you recall, initially, the Iranians were making significant gains, even though the Iranian military, at least the leadership, was purged. They were able to seize some Iraqi land initially during the first phase of the war, and then there was a stalemate.

And what really turned the tide was in 1987, where Iraq was able to fire and strike deep into Tehran, but the Iranians couldn’t respond because they didn’t have the weapons capability Iraq had. So they couldn’t bring that same type of response. And that’s what brought Tehran to its knees and forced Ayatollah Khomeini to come to the negotiating table.

Saddam couldn’t afford to let the Iranians realize he had lost that capability because of US sanctions and the weapons inspections of Iraq. He “bluffed” his biggest enemy into believing he was still as powerful and as dangerous as he was during the 1987-’88 time frame.

I asked Saddam, “When sanctions were lifted, what were you going to do?” He said, “We were going to do what we needed to do or what we would have to do to protect us.” Which was his way of saying he would have reconstituted his entire WMD program.

Bergen: Was he surprised by the US invasion?

Piro: No, he wasn’t surprised when it happened. Initially, he didn’t think that we would invade. If you look at the majority of 2002, he was under the impression we were going to do airstrikes, as we had done in 1998, the US bombing campaign called Desert Fox, which was four-day aerial strikes, and he was able to survive that.

So that’s why he was defiant until September 2002, which is when he realized that President Bush intended to invade Iraq. So, he changed his position or posture and allowed weapons inspectors into Iraq to try and prevent it. Still, he told me that probably by October or November 2002, he realized that war was inevitable and then started to prepare himself and his leadership and military for war.

Bergen: Do you think he was surprised by how quickly the US toppled his regime?

Piro: He told me that he asked his military commanders to prepare for two weeks of conventional war, and then at that point, he expected and anticipated the unconventional war or the insurgency would kick in, and that would be a much more challenging type of warfare for the United States.

Bergen: Well, that turned out to be exactly right. … A good part of your interrogation became the basis of the trial of Saddam, right? You delved into his crimes against his people, and that evidence eventually was used in court against him and led to his trial and eventually his execution. Is that correct?

Piro: That’s correct. So, our primary goal was to collect intelligence, to answer the two key questions that brought us to war but also collect any evidence that would be helpful for his eventual prosecution because everyone understood, at some point, Saddam had to face justice for the horrible atrocities that he was responsible for.

So, we focused also on historical events: We talked about the invasion of Kuwait and the gassing of the Kurds. Saddam did make critical admissions, and not only Saddam but so did all of his other subordinate leaders.

So, we were able to gather all of that type of evidence and compile it, and I was fortunate enough to be asked to put together the report that was the basis of Saddam’s prosecution. We located and identified witnesses that survived those attacks that were willing to travel and appear in court in front of Saddam and testify to his crimes and we recovered documents and audio that supported the case.

Bergen: The big question 20 years later is, was it all worth it? You look at Iraq, and there was the civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq under Saddam, but after the US invasion, a powerful al Qaeda branch known as al Qaeda in Iraq sprang up, which eventually morphed into ISIS. Then you have the spread of sectarianism, which has always existed in the Middle East but was undoubtedly amplified by the Iraq War and spread into Syria and became part of that civil war.

Saddam was a terrible human being. He’s one of the most murderous men of the late 20th century. Yet, at the same time, he kept a lid on things in Iraq, which had a functional education system and a relatively educated population, and that all blew up due to the US invasion. So how do you reflect on all this?

Piro: That’s a very tough question. Saddam is one of the most brutal dictators of our time and was responsible for some of the most horrific atrocities in history. But on the other hand, he told me we had no idea how difficult it was to rule Iraq, but we would figure that out by removing him.

And then you ask yourself, was it worth it? As an FBI agent, thankfully, I was not in a position to think about that or focus on that; my job was to interrogate.

On the other hand, what frustrates me more is that there were key opportunities at the beginning of the war and significant failures on our part, and if we had not made those, I wonder how different Iraq would look today.

Bergen: And what are those failures?

Piro: For me, one of the biggest was the US dismantling the Iraqi military.

Bergen: Why?

Piro: The biggest employer in Iraq in 2003 was the Iraqi military. So, we come in, and we completely dismantle the military. As in any country, a soldier relies on their salary and benefits to survive, and most have families and obligations, and responsibilities.

We didn’t realize the impact of that decision, and we just fired everyone. We didn’t think about how that was going to affect the situation in-country when you look at a workforce with a unique skill set and training that’s not transferrable to a lot of other things. And as a result, they became disgruntled and angry, and that was initially the basis of the insurgency that we faced in 2003 and 2004.

We had a very short time frame to really leverage the removal of Saddam before the Iraqi people saw us as an occupying force. I believe we had a six-month window, and we made huge mistakes.

Bergen: Now that you’re a private citizen: Do you have a reflection on where Iraq is now and what the future might look like?

Piro: I’m not too optimistic about the future of Iraq, primarily because what Iraq needs is a leader who puts Iraq first. That was the one thing Saddam did — he put Iraq first, in a sense, and consolidated everybody together. As you look at how divided it is, until someone comes in and doesn’t care about your religious or ethnic background and thinks of Iraq as one country, its future will be a challenge.

Bergen: Eventually, Saddam was executed by the Shia-dominated Iraqi government in December 2006. A video was broadcast on state television showing that moments before Saddam was hanged, the guards who brought him into the execution chamber mocked him, shouting the name of a famous Shia cleric. Did you see that? What was your reaction?

Piro: Yes. I did see that, as it was aired on every news channel around the world. And I’ll be honest, I did not enjoy it — and I’ve only seen it once, and the reason why I didn’t enjoy it, is it took away from the legality of it, right? Saddam was executed based on a conviction for the crimes that he had committed against the Iraqi people. Still, when you look at how he was executed: It looked like vengeance.

Bergen: And for people who haven’t seen this tape of Saddam’s execution, what was (it) about this that you thought was wrong?

Piro: He and I talked about his upcoming execution because he knew he was going to be convicted and executed, irrelevant of what kind of defense he raised or anything like that. So, for him, his trial and his execution were to repair or redeem his image. He wanted to overcome the image of being pulled out of the hole where he was captured by American soldiers, looking disheveled, and some labeled him as a coward for not resisting or fighting. So, for him, his trial and execution were what he wanted to utilize to erase that and give something else for people to remember him by.

At his execution, as he was brought in, those who were implementing the execution were mocking him. They mocked him, and he laughed them off, and he prayed. He didn’t have to be helped to the rope, and he didn’t wear a mask to cover his face. He came across as very defiant and, in a sense, very strong or brave. And that’s what people remember, especially among the Sunni population in the Arab world.

Bergen: And now you’re writing a book. How are you putting that together?

Piro: With the Bureau’s approval, I am writing a book about the experience. My goal is to allow the reader to have a seat inside the interrogation and to feel like they’re sitting right there watching it firsthand, not just what Saddam said because some of that is already available, but more about the experience itself, the challenges, the chess game he and I played.

I also got an inside view of the journal he kept and was able to see his thoughts and his perceptions when he was in prison. Saddam told me I got to know him better than his two sons did because I ended up spending more time with him than his two sons did. So, all of that will be in the book to give the reader insight not only into the brutal dictator but also into the other sides of Saddam Hussein.

Bergen: Well, that’s going to be a fascinating read.

Opinion: What went right and wrong on Covid, CNN.com

Opinion: What went right and wrong on Covid
Opinion by Peter Bergen
Updated 10:06 AM EST, Thu March 2, 2023

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are the author’s own. View more opinion on CNN.

The Chinese lab leak report from the Department of Energy saying it has “low confidence” that the Covid-19 virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan made headlines earlier this week.

Then on Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray weighed in, telling Fox News that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

On Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning responded to that assessment, saying that the lab leak theory holds “no credibility at all.”

This all adds to the confusion surrounding the virus’s origins. There is considerable science pointing to animal-to-human transmission as the origin of the virus, but there is also credible reporting and the FBI director’s public assessment that it likely leaked from labs researching viruses in Wuhan.

And we may never truly know how the Covid-19 virus originated because the Chinese government didn’t allow international inspectors into Wuhan for weeks after a new mysterious, lethal virus first emerged there in December 2019.

Initially, the local Wuhan government downplayed the virus. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were covering up a lab leak, but rather this may point to simple incompetence – a pretty good explanation of most human activity. As CNN noted, “top-down bureaucracy and rigid procedures that were ill-equipped to deal with the emerging crisis” may have been to blame, a conclusion based on an examination of internal Chinese documents from the first months of the crisis.

By the time the central Chinese government got serious about the virus, it was already spreading worldwide.

While the new Department of Energy intelligence report does not settle the question of the precise origin of the virus, it does point us to the need for a bipartisan Covid-19 commission that goes well beyond US House investigations of Covid that are planned for this year.

Consider that almost as many Americans have died of Covid-19 already – some 1.1 million – as have died in every war since the American Revolution. If that isn’t a significant national security problem, I’m not sure what is.

And yet the United States hasn’t had any systematic examination by the government of how this happened. A good deal of that is likely because the whole issue of the pandemic is so politicized – but so too were the debates about whether the George W. Bush administration might have done a better job thwarting the 9/11 attacks.

The Bush administration initially blocked a commission to investigate 9/11. Following intense public pressure, the administration finally agreed to allow a commission to be formed more than a year after the attacks.

The 9/11 commission not only told the whole backstory of the attacks, but it also proposed lasting reforms that made Americans safer when they were implemented, such as the creation of a National Counterterrorism Center that coordinates all counterterrorism intelligence across the US government and the creation of a new Office of the Director of National Intelligence which coordinates the work of all of the US intelligence agencies.

A similar Covid-19 commission must be formed to investigate how the virus emerged, which responses to the virus worked or didn’t work as it spread across the United States and the lessons learned for how best to prepare for the next pandemic.

Each party should appoint subject matter experts on pandemics, epidemiology and emergency response to take part in this Covid-19 commission. It should have sufficient staff and money and subpoena power to investigate questions such as, “How did we get here?” And, “What can be done to mitigate the next pandemic?”

This general view shows the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province on February 3, 2021, as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, visit.

Assessment Covid-19 leaked from Chinese lab is a minority view within US intel community, sources say
Of course, some questions may never be completely settled, like the lab leak theory vs. the natural transmission theory.

Still, there are pressing questions that the Covid-19 commission should address so that we are better prepared for the next pandemic, which will inevitably eventually happen.

Here are eleven questions that a Covid-19 commission could try and answer:

Where did the coronavirus originate from?

After 9/11, the US spent many billions of dollars preparing for a possible bioterrorism attack. Where did all that funding go and why were those defenses against bioterrorism not more helpful in responding to the pandemic?

Why did the Trump administration eliminate the National Security Council’s pandemic unit in 2018? What effect did that have?
An early decision by former President Donald Trump during the pandemic was to bar non-US citizens who had recently visited China from entering the US. What kind of effect did that have on mitigating the spread of the virus?

Why didn’t the US government ensure there were enough medical-grade masks to cope with the pandemic when it started?

Why was there so little federal leadership on containing the virus in the early months of the pandemic? Those decisions were primarily left to individual states. What effect did this uncoordinated response have?

Trump said on February 26, 2020, that the number of Covid-19 cases would soon be close to zero. He also claimed that the coronavirus was no more dangerous than the flu. What effect did this have on the behavior of the American public and how did that behavior impact the spread of the virus?

What role did right-wing media play in downplaying the pandemic and how did that affect sentiments among some Republicans that the coronavirus was being hyped?

Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, told a congressional committee in closed-door testimony in 2021 that “we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30-percent-less to 40-percent-less range.” How did she come to that conclusion?

To its credit, the Trump administration launched “Operation Warp Speed,” which saved many lives during the Covid-19 pandemic. As part of that effort, the US invested $2.5 billion in Moderna, which produced a testable vaccine on humans in only two months. Why did Operation Warp Speed work so well? And what are the lessons for future vaccine development?
Covid-19 mortality rates per capita in the US are much higher than in other wealthy nations such as Canada, France, Germany and Japan. What went right in other countries that didn’t go right in the US?

If we get some reasonable answers to these and other questions, the next pandemic that rolls around may not claim more than a million American lives.

[ONLINE] – The Invasion of Iraq – Twenty Years On, New America

[ONLINE] – The Invasion of Iraq – Twenty Years On
EVENT

This month, the United States will mark 20 years since it invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003. In the wake of the invasion, hundreds of thousands of people would die in an ensuing civil war. The war also helped re-energize a jihadist movement that was struggling to deal with U.S. counterterrorism operations and the loss of safe haven in Afghanistan. The broader story of the Middle East region, including the Arab Spring protest wave, as well as the story of U.S. power more broadly cannot be told without close attention to the impact of the U.S. invasion. Even as the U.S. sought to put the Iraq war behind it, ISIS’ surge across Iraq in 2014 reiterated that the war and its aftermath continue.

Join New America’s International Security Program for a discussion of the Iraq invasion and its ongoing impact 20 years after it started. To discuss this topic, New America welcomes Simona Foltyn, Joel Rayburn, and Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi. Simona Foltyn is a journalist based in Baghdad and PBS Newshour Special Correspondent and was previously Al Jazeera’s Iraq Correspondent from 2019-2021. Joel Rayburn is a retired U.S. Army officer and fellow with New America’s International Security Program. He has previously served as U.S. Special Envoy for Syria and as Senior Director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon on the National Security Council. He also directed the Army’s Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group, producing an operational history of the Army’s experience in the Iraq war published in the two-volume study The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, for which Rayburn was co-author and editor. He is also author of Iraq After America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance. Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi is a technical expert on Iraq with the Physicians for Human Rights. Previously, he was a human rights/transitional justice officer with the UN Support Mission in Libya and a fellow at the Carr Center, where he examined electoral systems in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He also reported on Iraqi politics for the New York Times. He was also a Harvard Nieman Fellow in 2007. He holds an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Join the conversation online using #IraqWar20th and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANTS

Simona Foltyn, @SimonaFoltyn
Journalist Based in Baghdad
PBS Newshour Special Correspondent

Joel Rayburn
Fellow, New America International Security Program
Author, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War
Former U.S. Special Envoy for Syria

Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi
Technical Expert on Iraq, Physicians for Human Rights

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Center on the Future of War, ASU
Professor of Practice, ASU

Gen. David Petraeus: How the war in Ukraine will end, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. View more opinion on CNN.

The war in Ukraine is at a stalemate, but that doesn’t mean it’s not changing. General David Petraeus predicts the war will look different this year with significant offensives likely staged by the two sides. Overall, the war continues to demonstrate basic weaknesses in Russia’s military, which was once thought to be one of the most capable in the world.

Petraeus has spent decades studying warfare and practicing its application. He was the US and coalition commander of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and later served as director of the CIA. He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton with a dissertation on the Vietnam War and the lessons the American military took from it. Petraeus is also the co-author, with British historian Andrew Roberts, of the forthcoming book, “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine.”

As we approach the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, I asked Petraeus to reflect on the larger lessons of the war.

He says the Russians have lost many battles because of multiple failures of their military culture, doctrine, organizational structures, training and equipping. While Petraeus says this is in many ways the first open-source war, other aspects are being fought with Cold War tactics and weapons – albeit with upgraded capabilities, drones and precision munitions.

Petraeus, who criticized the Biden administration’s withdrawal of Afghanistan, strikes a different tone on Ukraine. He says the President’s team has done a very impressive job of leading NATO and the West to counter the Russian invasion, though there have been times he would have liked to have seen decisions to provide certain weapons systems (such as western tanks and longer-range precision munitions) made sooner than they were.

The enormous US and western support of Ukraine means, Petraeus observes, that while the Russians may be preparing to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers into Ukraine in a new offensive, they will face off in the coming months with better-trained and better-organized Ukrainian soldiers armed with American longer-range missiles, armored vehicles and a tremendous amount of ammunition. And Petraeus says his money is still on the Ukrainians.

Meanwhile, as Petraeus notes, though Russian President Vladimir Putin set out to Make Russia Great Again with his invasion of Ukraine, he has, instead, achieved exactly that with the NATO alliance.

We conducted the interview over email.

Bergen: Who’s winning the war?

Petraeus: It is not Russia. Russia has, after all, lost the Battles of Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv; failed to take the rest of Ukraine’s southern coast (not even getting through Mykolaiv, much less to the major port at Odesa).

It has lost what it had gained in Kharkiv province. And it has had to withdraw its only forces west of the Dnipro River in Kherson province because the Ukrainians made the vital bridge connections to those forces impassable, took out the headquarters and logistics sites supporting those forces, and isolated them from the rest of the Russian elements east of the river.

That said, the battle lines since the withdrawal of the forces west of the Dnipro last fall have been fairly static, although Russian forces have made grinding, incremental and very costly gains in villages around Bakhmut in southeast Ukraine. And the Ukrainians are having to commit additional forces to defend the areas under pressure.

So, the situation is essentially a stalemate at present, albeit with Russia making costly attacks in several areas, and with both sides building up forces for offensive operations expected in the late winter (likely the Russians) and spring/summer (the Ukrainians).

The side that generates the most capable, well-trained and well-equipped forces by then will make the most significant gains. And my bet is on Ukraine in that regard.

Bergen: What are the lessons of the Ukraine War for the future of warfare?

Petraeus: I think we should recognize that, with a few exceptions, Ukraine is not the future of warfare. In large measure, it is what we would have seen had the Cold War turned hot in the mid-1980s – with largely Cold War weapons systems (albeit with some modernization).

We are, however, seeing some glimpses and hints of what the future of warfare might look like. We see the Ukrainian use of drones (of only modest range and capability) as aerial observers identifying Russian headquarters and other targets for the precision munitions the US has provided (which will double in range from 70-80 kilometers to 150 kilometers when the just announced US precision munitions arrive in Ukraine).

We see the impact of sophisticated, western-provided fire-and-forget shoulder-launched anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. We have seen the impact of select use of medium-range anti-ship missiles. And we have seen use of offensive cyber capabilities, though not with enormous success, by the Russians.

Perhaps most notably, of course, we see a war taking place, for the first time, in a context that includes the widespread presence of smart phones, internet connectivity, and social media and other internet sites.

But, again, these are just hints of what the future of war between advanced powers would be. In such a conflict, the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems would be incomparably more capable; precision munitions would have vastly greater range, speed and explosive power.

And there would incomparably greater numbers of vastly more capable unmanned systems (some remotely piloted, others operating according to algorithms) in every domain – not just in the air, but also at sea, sub-sea, on the ground, in outer space, and in cyberspace, and operating in swarms, not just individually!

And every intelligence and strike capability will be integrated and connected by advanced command, control, communications and computer systems.

I recall an adage back in the Cold War days that stated, “If it can be seen, it can be hit; if it can be hit, it can be killed.” In truth, we didn’t have the surveillance assets, precision munitions and other capabilities needed to truly “operationalize” that adage in those days. In the future, however, just about everything – certainly every platform, base and headquarters – will be seen and thus be susceptible to being hit and destroyed (unless there are substantial defenses and hardening of those assets).

Imagining all this underscores, of course, that we must take innumerable actions to transform our forces and systems. We must deter future conflict by ensuring that there are no questions about our capabilities or our willingness to employ them – and also by doing everything possible to ensure that competition among great powers does not turn into conflict among them.

Bergen: Several years back, some people were calling NATO obsolete. Is it?

Petraeus: This question gets at one of the ironies of the situation. Putin set out to “Make Russia Great Again.” However, what he has done is make NATO great again – with two very capable, historically neutral powers (Finland and Sweden) seeking NATO membership; with substantially increased defense spending by NATO members, most notably Germany; with augmentation of NATO forces in the Baltic states and eastern Europe; and with the greatest unity among NATO members since the end of the Cold War.

Thanks to Putin, the description of NATO as suffering from “brain death” by French President Macron in late 2019 has turned out to be more than a bit premature.

Bergen: Is the Russian military’s performance in Ukraine surprising to you?

Petraeus: Not completely. In an interview with The Atlantic published shortly before the Russian invasion, I explained the considerable difficulties I expected Russia would encounter and noted that an invasion force of some 190,000 was much less than what likely would be required, especially if the Ukrainians proved to be as determined as I thought they would be (and they have been even more so).

Beyond that, though, even I didn’t foresee how miserably the Russians would perform.
Bergen: Is Russia failing because of failures of intelligence? Failures of its conscripts? Failures of Russian military culture? All the above?

Petraeus: All of the above and more. The list is long, including poor campaign design; wholly inadequate training (what were they doing for all those months they were deployed on the northern, eastern, and southern borders of Ukraine?); poor command, control, and communications; inadequate discipline (and a culture that condones war crimes and abuse of local populations); poor equipment (exemplified by turrets blowing off of tanks when fires ignite in them); insufficient logistic capabilities; inability to achieve combined arms effects (to employ all ground and air capabilities effectively together); inadequate organizational architecture; lack of a professional noncommissioned officer corps; a top-down command system that does not promote initiative at lower levels and pervasive corruption that undermines every aspect of their military – and the supporting military-industrial complex.

Bergen: So, do we not have to worry about Russia as a “great power” anymore?

Petraeus: Not at all. Russia still has enormous military capacity and is certainly still a nuclear superpower, as well as a country with enormous energy, mineral and agricultural blessings. It also has a population (about 145 million) that is nearly double that of the next largest European countries (Germany and Turkey, each just more than 80 million).

And it is still led by a kleptocratic dictator who embraces innumerable grievances and extreme revanchist views that severely undermine his decision-making.

Bergen: You know the observation sometimes attributed to Stalin: “Quantity has a quality all its own.” Russia has a far bigger population than Ukraine: Will that make a critical difference to the Ukraine war over the long term?

Petraeus: It could if Putin mobilized all of Russia successfully. However, to date, the mobilizations have been partial, as Putin seems to fear how the country might respond to total mobilization. In fact, reportedly, more Russian men left the country than reported to the mobilization stations in response to the latest partial call-up of reserves.

Nonetheless, it is estimated that as many as 300,000 new recruits and mobilized reservists are being sent to the frontlines, with up to 100,000-150,000 more on the way. And that is not trivial – because quantity does, indeed, matter.

Bergen: But is Napoleon correct in this case: “In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one” – and Ukrainian morale seems to be higher.

Petraeus: That is a huge factor. Ukrainians sees the ongoing conflict as their War of Independence, and they have responded accordingly. President Volodomyr Zelensky has been positively Churchillian in rallying all Ukrainians to the service of their country as it fights for its national survival.

Thus, Ukrainians know what they are fighting for, while it is not clear that the same is true of many of the Russian soldiers, a disproportionate number of whom are from ethnic and sectarian minorities in the Russian Federation.

Moreover, Ukraine has, to date, done a better job than Russia of recruiting, training, equipping, organizing and employing additional forces – enabled by the extraordinary support provided by the US (more than $26 billion in arms, ammunition, and other security assistance since the beginning of the latest invasion) and other NATO and western countries. And I think we will see further evidence of this when Ukraine launches its counter-offensive in the spring or summer.

Bergen: What technologies have proven key to Ukrainian successes in this war? Several newish technologies seem to have proven important: Elon Musk’s Starlink mobile satellite systems kept communications open for the Ukrainians after the Russians had partially destroyed the phone system and jammed it. US-supplied HIMARS precision rockets have decimated Russian targets. Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition technology used by some US police departments, has enabled the Ukrainians to identify Russian soldiers on the battlefield. TB2 Turkish armed drones have proven devastating to Russian targets and cheap commercial drones have helped the Ukrainians find targets.

Petraeus: All of those technologies have proven very important, and the Ukrainians have demonstrated enormous skill in adapting various technologies and commercial applications to enable intelligence gathering, targeting and other military tasks.

In fact, the Ukrainians have also shown exceptional abilities to “McGyver” solutions for a variety of problems – whether adapting Western missiles for use on MiG-29 fighter aircraft, repairing battle-damaged armored vehicles left on the battlefield by the Russians (remember the Ukrainians’ “tractor army”), or jamming Russian communications.

And the Ukrainians also have demonstrated a very impressive ability to learn how to employ new weapons systems and vehicles much more rapidly than anyone anticipated, as they want to master new capabilities as quickly as is possible and get back to the fight.

Bergen: How would you grade the Biden administration’s approach to the Ukraine war?

Petraeus: I think the Biden Administration has led NATO and the rest of the western world very impressively in responding to the Russian invasion – providing enormous quantities of arms, ammunition, and other material and economic assistance. And also guiding the effort to impose economic, financial and personal sanctions and export controls on Russia. (And I offer this, noting that I am not a member of a political party and was very critical of the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and the way the withdrawal was conducted.)

To be sure, there have been times when I have felt that we should have decided to provide various capabilities (e.g., HIMARS, longer-range precision munitions, tanks, etc.) sooner than we have.

However, having sat around the Situation Room table in the West Wing of the White House, I know that it is far easier to second-guess from the outside than it is to make tough calls in office. But there are some additional capabilities (advanced drones, even longer-range precision munitions, fighter aircraft, and additional air defense and counter-drone capabilities) that I would like to see us provide sooner rather than later.

Eventually, for example, Ukraine is going to have to transition from eastern bloc aircraft (e.g., MiG-29s) to western ones (e.g., F-16s). There just aren’t any more MiGs to provide to them, and they reportedly have more pilots than aircraft at this point.

So, we might as well begin the process of transition, noting that it will take a number of months, regardless, to train pilots and maintenance personnel. All that said, again, I think the Administration has done a very impressive job and proven to be the indispensable nation in this particular situation – with important ramifications for other situations around the world.

Bergen: How would you grade Putin in this campaign? Has he got anything right?

Petraeus: Putin has earned a failing grade to date. Let’s recall that the first and most important task of a strategic leader is to “get the big ideas right” – that is, to get the overall strategy and fundamental decisions right. Putin clearly has failed abysmally in that task, resulting in a war that has made him and his country a pariah, set back the Russian economy by a decade or more (losing many of Russia’s best and brightest, and prompting over 1,200 western companies to leave Russia or reduce operations there), done catastrophic damage to the Russian military and its reputation and put his legacy in serious jeopardy.

That said, we should not underestimate Putin. He still believes that Russia can “out-suffer” the Ukrainians, Europeans, and Americans in the same way that Russians out-suffered Napoleon’s army and Hitler’s Nazis. And the US and our NATO and western allies and partners need to do all that we can, as quickly as we can, to enable Ukraine and prove Putin wrong.

Bergen: The quasi-private Wagner Group is the force that Putin sends into the meat grinder of the toughest battles. Any thoughts on using mercenaries, many of whom are convicts, as a tactic?

Petraeus: What Russia has done with what are, in essence, mercenaries, as you note, is somewhat innovative – but also essentially inhumane, as it entails throwing soldiers (many of them former convicts) into battle as cannon fodder, and with little, if any, concern for their survival.

These are not the tactics or practices that, at the end of the day, foster development of well-trained, disciplined, capable, and cohesive units that have trust in their leaders and soldiers on their left and right.

Bergen: What are the lessons of Ukraine for the Chinese if they were to stage an invasion of Taiwan, which would not be over a neighboring land border but over a 100-mile body of water? Does the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea navy, reshape how the Chinese might think about this question?

Petraeus: As a general observation, I think the developments in Ukraine have to be a cautionary tale for any country around the world contemplating a very challenging military operation – especially if that country’s forces have not engaged in major (or any) combat operations in many decades.

And especially if the target of such an operation has a population willing to fight fiercely for its survival and be supported by major powers – not just militarily but with substantial economic, financial, and personal sanctions and export controls.

Bergen: Putin has hinted at using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine: Is that plausible? What would/should the US response be were that to happen?

Petraeus: It is certainly possible that Putin could order Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Peter, and we should be concerned about that possibility. However, that would be an incredibly bad decision on his part, as use of such weapons would result in Russia being in a worse situation than it was before their use, rather than a better situation.

And it is critical that the leaders of the US and other western nations – and of China and India, as well – convey clearly and repeatedly to Putin that the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons for Russia would, indeed, be “catastrophic,” to quote US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

Bergen: Is this the first truly open-source war? The war in Ukraine is being fought in part on social media by Zelensky; commercial overhead satellites capture Russian battle groups moving around in real-time, and the social media accounts of Russian mercenaries in the Wagner Group document what they are doing.

Petraeus: Yes, I believe it is. This is the first war in which smartphones and social media have been so widely available and also so widely employed. The result is unprecedented transparency and an extraordinary amount of information available – all through so-called “open sources.”

Bergen: What does Putin want?

Petraeus: In the long term, Putin still wants to deny Ukraine its sovereignty and make it part of the Russian Federation. In Putin’s grievance-filled, revisionist version of history, Ukraine does not have a right to exist as an independent country.

That said, in the short term, having failed to take control of Kyiv and replace President Zelensky with a pro-Russian figure, Putin is seeking to expand the area of Ukraine controlled by Russian forces. Particularly in the southeastern part of Russia, and to solidify Russian control over the provinces that connect Russia with Crimea in the so-called land bridge, so that Russia does not have to rely solely on the Kerch Strait Bridge for connection with Crimea.

Bergen: Does Putin have a plan? Or is he just improvising?

Petraeus: Well, Putin recently made General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff, the commander of the war in Ukraine, presumably to ensure that the Russian Military and Ministry of Defense are doing all that they can to generate additional forces for the battlefield in Ukraine. And Russia has been seeking additional arms, ammunition, and weapons systems from other countries – such as Iran and North Korea – to make up for the shortfalls in production of Russia’s military industries that are constrained by export controls.

Beyond that, it appears that Russia is massing replacement soldiers and additional units to launch an offensive to take the portions of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces in the southeast, that they do not control – while also establishing defensive positions in depth in other areas that they control in the south.

That said, there does not seem to be a particularly innovative new plan, given the limitations of the professional capabilities of the Russian forces and their demonstrated inability to generate “combined arms effect” – to integrate the actions of tanks with infantry, artillery/mortars, engineers, explosive ordnance disposal, electronic warfare, fixed and rotary wing close air support, air defenses, effective command and control, drones, etc.

In the absence of that, we will likely see more of what we have seen in the past – Russian commanders throwing recently mobilized, inadequately trained, and poorly equipped soldiers into tough fights. And supported by massive artillery and rocket fires (assuming they can maintain the supply of artillery rounds and rockets), to achieve grinding, costly, incremental gains – with, perhaps, an occasional limited breakthrough.

And all of this will be happening while we await the Ukrainian offensive that will be launched in the spring or summer, with much better trained, better equipped and more capable Ukrainian forces.

Bergen: How will the next stage of the war be different from the first year?

Petraeus: There will be several new features this year, most significantly the additional capabilities on the Ukrainian side: Western tanks and infantry fighting vehicles; longer-range and larger precision munitions for the US-provided HIMARS (high mobility artillery rocket systems) that will enable precise strikes out to 150 kilometers (twice the range of the current precision munition); additional air defense systems of various types; augmented air defenses and additional wheeled armored vehicles, as well as enormous quantities of additional ammunition of all types.
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Beyond that, I believe we will see Ukrainian forces that are much more capable than the Russians at achieving the kind of combined arms effects that I described earlier and that thus enable much more effective offensive operations and can unhinge some of the Russian defenses. We may not see all this, however, until the spring or even summer, given the amount of time required for Ukrainian forces to receive and train on the new western tanks and other systems.

Meanwhile, in addition to the Russian offensive I mentioned earlier, I fear we will also see additional Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure with Russian missiles and rockets, as well as with Iranian-provided drones – which underscores the importance of doing all that we can to further constrain the Russian arms industries and also those of Iran.

Bergen: In 2003, at the beginning of the Iraq War, you famously asked a rhetorical question: “Tell me how this ends?” For the war in Ukraine: How does this end?

Petraeus: I think it ends in a negotiated resolution, when Putin recognizes that the war is unsustainable on both the battlefield (where Russia has in the first year likely taken many times the losses that the USSR took in nearly a decade in Afghanistan) and on the home front (which has been heavily impacted by economic, financial, economic, and personal sanctions and export controls).

Also when Ukraine reaches the limits of its ability to withstand missile and drone strikes, getting a Marshall-like plan (developed by the US and G7) to help rebuild the country, and gaining an ironclad security guarantee (either NATO membership or, if that is not possible, a US-led coalition guarantee).

A security guarantee will be critical to enabling the success of the reconstruction effort and attracting outside investment.

The strange objects in US airspace may be an even bigger problem than we thought, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

Last month, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report about “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” — in plain English, unidentified flying objects or UFOs.

The US military on February 4 shot down a Chinese spy balloon (which Beijing said was a weather balloon), followed by the downing of two unidentified flying objects on Friday and Saturday in US and Canadian airspace, which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told ABC were likely also balloons.

Then on Sunday, the US military shot down a fourth flying object, this time over Lake Huron in Michigan.

In the wake of those actions, the report by America’s intelligence community is worth examining since it may shed some light on what is happening here.

January’s UFO report had a striking finding: The number of UFO sightings significantly increased between March 2021 and August 2022, during which time 247 new sightings were reported, mostly by US Navy and Air Force pilots and personnel. That’s almost double the 144 UFO sightings reported in the 17-year period between 2004 to 2021.

The report suggested that the increase may be because there is less “stigma” associated with reporting UFO sightings, now that the Pentagon is actively pushing service personnel to report any “anomalies” seen in the sky.

Indeed, in July, the Pentagon established a new entity, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, to investigate credible sightings of UFOs by the US military and intelligence community.

This is part of a relatively new push by Congress and the Pentagon to make sense of more than 500 credible UFO sightings over the past couple of decades.

The report by the US intelligence community found that a large number of those sightings, 163, were balloons or “balloon-like entities,” while 26 were unmanned aircraft systems, i.e., drones. An unspecified number of sightings were “attributable to sensor irregularities or variances, such as operator or equipment error.”

There were 171 unidentified object sightings, however, for which no explanation was found, and some of those objects “demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities.”

The report also noted that UFO sightings “continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight.” It added that the sightings could point to “adversary collection activity,” suggesting that UFOs found around sensitive US military installations could be a foreign power spying on them.

There is undoubtedly much more to learn about those 171 UFO sightings, which still have no good explanations. Are they the work of a foreign power probing US air defenses? Are they relatively innocuous, such as errant balloons?

Congress should convene hearings to get to the bottom of this. The public has a right to understand why objects are flying around in American airspace that the Pentagon and the US intelligence community can’t identify.

The long, strange history of spy balloons, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN
Published 7:57 PM EST, Tue February 7, 2023

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Shooting down China’s balloon was akin to my 11-year-old son finally popping the toy balloon he had been batting around the house all week.

And it reminded me that when my father, Tom Bergen, was a lieutenant in the US Air Force in the mid-1950s, he worked on a program to help send balloons into Soviet airspace.

In 1954 he was assigned to Headquarters Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. There he worked on the “Grand Union” project, which deployed balloons that carried cameras over the then-Soviet Union. Those spy balloons were launched from Turkey.

Spy balloons are some really old technology, folks. Using them is like bringing a well-sharpened ax to the Afghan War; maybe it could have done something, but a 2,000-pound bomb would likely have a larger effect on the enemy. (China has denied the balloon was used for spying.)

Indeed, balloons have been used as spying devices since the late 18th century. Some of Napoleon’s soldiers used them for reconnaissance in 1794. In the US Civil War, Union forces used balloons to track Confederate armies; there was even a Union Balloon Corps.

Now the United States and its rivals have these new-fangled gizmos called “spy satellites,” which can take photos! They can do full-motion video! They can take thermal imagery that detects individuals moving around at night! When the skies are clear, they can spy on pretty much anything, with a resolution of centimeters.

Indeed, commercial satellite imagery is now getting so inexpensive that you can go out and buy your own close-up images of, say, a Russian battle group in Ukraine. Just ask Maxar Technologies; they have built up a rather profitable business on this model, which was just acquired two months ago for $6 billion by a private equity firm.

In other words, the overflight of US territory by China’s balloon is not a national security catastrophe as a bunch of hyperventilating Republican politicians from former President Donald Trump on downward have implied.

But it may help explain, at least in part, an element of a little-noticed report published by the US Office of Director of National Intelligence last month.

The report examined more than 500 reports of unidentified objects in the sky over the past two decades, many of them reported by US Navy and US Air Force personnel and pilots. These reports were assessed by the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a fancy name for the office that tries to examine UFO sightings.

The report noted that many of those sightings, 163, were balloons or “balloon-like entities.”

Now comes the news that three other balloons from China were in American air space during the Trump administration but did not become widely known then.

This raises some interesting questions about the work of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: Could some of the balloons they identified be from China? And could some of the 171 “unexplained sightings” of UFOs that they also assessed be Chinese balloons?

Republicans have called for congressional hearings into the balloon affair, and surely these questions will get a good airing.

Spy balloons do offer some advantages over satellites; they are relatively inexpensive and can be more maneuverable. So it’s obviously worthwhile for the US military to continue to scan the skies looking for strange objects that might be Chinese balloons or spy drones.

But China has arguably done much worse. US officials have accused it of benefiting from the work of hackers who stole design data about the F-35 fighter aircraft as China builds its own new generation of fighters – and of sucking up much of the personal information of more than 20 million Americans who were current or former members of the US government when they reportedly got inside the computers of the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2015. China called the F-35 theft report “baseless” and denied responsibility for the OPM hacking.

Pumping up the balloon story may make for good politics, but it doesn’t make for a great assessment of the actual threats posed by China.