THE RISE AND FALL OF OSAMA BIN LADEN” University of Virginia, online

The Colonnade Club

PETER BERGEN RETURNS TO COLONNADE CLUB FOR A VIRTUAL DISCUSSION ON HIS BOOK ” THE RISE AND FALL OF OSAMA BIN LADEN”
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
6:30 PM 7:30 PM
HISTORIC & INTELLECTUAL PROGRAMMING COMMITTEE PROUDLY PRESENTS A VIRTUAL DISCUSSION WITH
PETER BERGEN
Author of the book “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden”.

Tuesday, August 10, 6:30 p.m.

The virtual discussion will be moderated by McGregor McCance

Associate Vice President for University Communication and

Executive Director, UVA Today

Click to learn more about McGregor McCance and his work
As we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, our university, our country and the world look back not only on the attacks of 2001 but also Bin Laden’s death ten years ago in 2011. Our special guest has extensively researched Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and will share his insights with the Colonnade Club.

In The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Peter Bergen provides unique and in-depth insights in the definitive biography of a man who set the course of American foreign policy for the 21st century, and whose ideological heirs we continue to battle today. Peter Bergen describes the dimensions and contradictions in Bin Laden’s life: as a family man, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive. Through exclusive interviews with family members and associates, and documents unearthed only recently, Bergen’s portrait of Osama will reveal for the first time who he really was and why he continues to inspire a new generation of jihadists.

“A compelling, nuanced portrait of America’s erstwhile public enemy

No. 1… Throughout, Bergen turns up revealing details and sharp arguments against received wisdom… Essential for anyone concerned with geopolitics, national security, and the containment of further terrorist actions.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling.” — H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World

PETER BERGEN
Peter Bergen is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows at New America; a professor of practice at Arizona State University; a fellow at Fordham University’s Center on National Security and CNN’s national security analyst. He has held teaching positions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Curator’s Corner: Osama bin Laden with Peter Bergen, Spy Museum DC ONLINE

Wednesday, September 8, 2021
12:00 PM ET

As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approached Peter Bergen sought to reevaluate the man responsible for precipitating America’s long wars with al-Qaeda and its descendants. Bergen produced the first television interview with bin Laden in 1997. He has had years to reflect on and study the man. In his new book The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden he captures all the dimensions of his life: family man, zealot, battlefield commander, terrorist leader, and fugitive.

Join International Spy Museum Historian and Curator Andrew Hammond in conversation with Bergen about the many contradictions he finds in bin Laden and why his legacy lives on despite his failure at achieving any of his strategic goals. Bergen, a Vice President at New America, is the author or editor of nine books, including three New York Times bestsellers and four Washington Post best nonfiction books of the year. He is a national security analyst for CNN and has testified before congressional committees 18 times about national security issues. Thanks to exclusive interviews with family members and associates, and documents unearthed only recently, Bergen has used the knowledge he has gained in the intervening years to discover who bin Laden really was and why he continues to inspire a new generation of jihadists.

Following their discussion, you’ll be able to ask questions via our online platform.

“The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden” by Peter Bergen

Five myths about Osama bin Laden, Washington Post

Outlook

He actually remained close with Taliban leaders — but not so much with Iranian officials.

Peter Bergen is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden,” a CNN national security analyst and a vice president at New America.

Osama bin Laden’s decision to launch the 9/11 attacks made him one of the most consequential figures of the early 21st century. The ensuing “war on terror” cost the United States trillions of dollars and the lives of more than 7,000 American service personnel, and tens of thousands more people were killed in seemingly endless wars around the Muslim world. After 9/11, bin Laden was reviled as a mass murderer but also, in some quarters, celebrated as a hero who had ostensibly stood up to the all-powerful United States. As a result, many myths have proliferated about this man who changed the course of history.
Myth No. 1

9/11 was bin Laden’s brilliant ploy to entangle the U.S. in wars.

The main proponent of this myth was bin Laden himself, who put a post facto gloss on the failure of his actual plan, which was to use the 9/11 attacks to force the United States to pull all of its forces out of the Middle East. When that strategy spectacularly backfired, and instead the United States occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, bin Laden claimed in 2004 that the 9/11 attacks were all along a fiendishly clever plot to embroil the United States in costly wars, asserting in a videotape released by Al Jazeera, “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” Even astute commentators bought this line; Ezra Klein, for instance, wrote in The Washington Post that “superpowers are so allergic to losing that they’ll bankrupt themselves trying to conquer a mass of rocks and sand. This was bin Laden’s plan for the United States.”

In fact, there was no evidence that this was really bin Laden’s plan. Before 9/11, bin Laden was convinced that the United States was a “paper tiger” and that its likely response to the attacks would be an ineffectual round of cruise missile strikes and perhaps some manned bomber raids. He didn’t anticipate that a relatively small group of CIA officers and U.S. Special Forces calling in massive American airstrikes, allied with Afghan militias on the ground, would overthrow his Taliban hosts in only three months.

Indeed, the U.S. response to 9/11 almost destroyed al-Qaeda. According to Abu Musab al-Suri, a longtime associate of bin Laden’s, 1,600 out of the 1,900 Arab fighters living in Afghanistan at the time were killed or captured when the Taliban was overthrown. Saif al-Adel, al-Qaeda’s military commander, similarly concluded that 9/11 had decimated the group, writing to a colleague in 2002, “We are experiencing one setback after another and have gone from misfortune to disaster.”

Myth No. 2

Al-Qaeda and the Taliban would separate after 9/11.

Experts on the Taliban claimed after the attacks that the militants were never really that close to al-Qaeda and had so much to lose from the alliance that, after their fall from power, they’d do the only rational thing and break from bin Laden’s group. A 2012 book by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, “An Enemy We Created,” claimed in its subtitle that the merger between the Taliban and al-Qaeda was a myth. This was also the underlying premise of the peace negotiations that the Trump administration began with the Taliban in 2018. Those talks predicated a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan on the Taliban separating itself from al-Qaeda.

In fact, documents recovered from bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after he was killed in a U.S. Navy SEAL raid on May 2, 2011, show that rather than breaking off contacts after 9/11, the Taliban and al-Qaeda maintained warm relations. They continued to cooperate on military operations, and al-Qaeda even provided funding to the Taliban. In the months before his death, bin Laden wrote a letter to the Taliban’s leader, Mohammad Omar, emphasizing that the United States would soon start to draw down from Afghanistan. Another letter celebrated a 2010 attack conducted by al-Qaeda and a branch of the Taliban against the vast U.S. base at Bagram, Afghanistan, which killed an American contractor and wounded a dozen soldiers.

That friendly relationship persists, according to a United Nations report this year, which concluded that the Taliban and al-Qaeda “remain close.” This explains why the Taliban’s “peace” negotiations with the Trump administration were always a charade — and why President Biden will probably come to regret his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of this month.

Myth No. 3

Pakistan protected bin Laden.

When bin Laden was discovered to be living in Abbottabad, not far from the Pakistani equivalent of West Point, many believed that he must have been protected by Pakistani officials. Then-Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, told ABC News shortly after the SEAL raid that he believed senior Pakistani officials had known of bin Laden’s location. (Levin died this past week at 87.) In 2018, President Donald Trump asserted to Fox News that “everybody in Pakistan knew he was there.”

Yet in the thousands of pages of letters and memos written by bin Laden or sent to him by his closest associates that were recovered in his compound, there is no evidence that he was in contact with Pakistani officials, nor that they had any clue about where he was hiding. After the raid, I spoke on the record to a range of senior U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama; John Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser; and the chairman of the joint chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, all of whom said Pakistani officials had no idea that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad.
Myth No. 4

Iran and al-Qaeda were allies.

Before he briefly became Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn co-wrote with leading Iran hawk Michael Ledeen a best-selling 2016 book, “The Field of Fight.” They asserted that Iran had a “close” relationship with al-Qaeda and that al-Qaeda’s attacks on two U.S. Embassies in Africa in 1998, which killed more than 200 people, were “in large part Iranian operations.” They also claimed that al-Qaeda was working on biological and chemical weapons with Iran. A 2005 Congressional Research Service report noted that the George W. Bush administration believed that Iran was letting senior al-Qaeda figures operate there shortly after 9/11 and that from Iranian soil, the group planned 2003 attacks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

But al-Qaeda’s relations with Iran were quite fraught. After the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, a number of bin Laden family members and al-Qaeda leaders fled to Iran, where they were placed under house arrest. The documents found in bin Laden’s compound show that he was extremely paranoid about the Iranians and was concerned that they might have planted tracking devices on some of his relatives, whom Iran started releasing from house arrest in 2010. The documents also showed that relations between al-Qaeda and Iran were hostile, and there was no evidence in them that they ever cooperated on terrorist attacks.

Myth No. 5

Bin Laden was a blowhard who never fought on the front lines.

Milton Bearden ran the CIA operation to arm the Afghans fighting the Soviets during the 1980s. After 9/11, Bearden was adamant that bin Laden hadn’t personally battled the Soviets, telling PBS that any suggestion that he had been a war hero was “a creation . . . a personal history, that I would submit is just simply wrong.” Similarly, the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who also played a key role in arming the Afghans in that conflict, told the Guardian: “He was not a fighter. By his own admission, he fainted during a battle, and when he woke up, the Soviet assault on his position had been defeated.”

In fact, there are a multitude of witness accounts of bin Laden fighting with almost suicidal bravery against the Soviets. He set up a base in Jaji, in eastern Afghanistan, and took part in a pitched battle there in 1987. Bin Laden’s wartime heroics were documented in two books in Arabic and also by a young Saudi reporter named Jamal Khashoggi, who later became a Washington Post contributing columnist. (Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi operatives in Istanbul in 2018.) After 9/11, bin Laden summoned hundreds of his followers to the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan to fight the Americans. There they holed up in caves for weeks, during which U.S. war planes dropped 700,000 pounds of ordnance. But in the middle of December 2001, bin Laden slipped away, eluding the United States for another decade.

This article is adapted from “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” Five myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on

The Last Days of Osama bin Laden, Wall Street Journal

ESSAY
The Last Days of Osama bin Laden

Revelations from the Abbottabad files show a terrorist leader scrambling for relevance in a world that had moved on

In the first weeks of 2011, Osama bin Laden was worried. For five years, he had concealed himself and his extended family—wives, children and grandchildren—in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, but now it appeared that his carefully constructed hideaway was coming apart. His longtime bodyguards were two brothers, members of al Qaeda whose family originated nearby. They did everything for bin Laden, from shopping in the local markets to hand delivering his lengthy memos to other leaders of al Qaeda.

But bin Laden’s bodyguards had become fed up with the risks that came with protecting and serving the world’s most wanted man. Bin Laden confided to one of his wives that the brothers were “getting exhausted” and planned to quit. Things got so bad that on January 15, he wrote a formal letter to them, despite the fact that they all lived together, acknowledging how angry they were with him and begging them to give him time to find new protectors and a new hideout (the compound was registered in the name of one of the brothers). He set down in writing that they had agreed to separate by mid-July.

Bin Laden never did find a new hiding place, however. He was killed, along with his son, Khalid, his two bodyguards and one of their wives, when U.S. Navy SEALs raided the compound on May 2, 2011. The operation not only rid the world of a terrorist mastermind; it recovered some 470,000 computer files from a trove of ten hard drives, five computers and around one hundred thumb drives and disks.

To understand the man who directed the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, and set the course of American foreign policy for two decades to follow, there is no better resource than these documents—thousands of pages of his private letters and secret memos. Released in full only at the end of 2017, the files reside on the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Among them is a handwritten journal, kept by two of bin Laden’s daughters, that records the last few weeks of his life. Its script is difficult to decipher, so it has previously received scant attention from journalists and researchers. But together with the other Abbottabad documents, it helps to clear up some important mysteries about bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Perplexed by the Arab Spring. During early 2011, in the weeks before he was killed, bin Laden, then in his mid-fifties, was agitated. History seemed to be passing him by. Uprisings swept the Middle East in what became known as the Arab Spring—events that he believed were the most important in the region in centuries. Yet the hundreds of thousands of protestors who risked their lives to protest in Egypt and Libya were not waving his organization’s banner or echoing its call for violent jihad. They were simply demanding basic human rights. Bin Laden was perplexed as to how to respond.

“Is it going to have a negative impact that this happened without jihad?” one of the bin Ladens asked about the Arab Spring.

Fortunately, his oldest wife, Umm Hamza—“the mother of Hamza”—rejoined him in Pakistan at just this time. Bin Laden regarded Umm Hamza as an intellectual peer. She was eight years his senior, with a Ph.D. in child psychology and a deep knowledge of the Koran, and she had spent a decade under house arrest in Iran, since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Now bin Laden believed that she could help him solve a problem: The Arab Spring revolutions were largely instigated by liberals. Could he nonetheless present himself as the movement’s leader?

In the weeks before he was killed, bin Laden held almost daily family meetings in the Abbottabad compound to discuss how he should respond to the Arab Spring. These consultations included Umm Hamza and his second oldest wife, Siham. A poet and an intellectual with a Ph.D. in Koranic grammar, Siham often edited bin Laden’s writings. She and Umm Hamza were his indispensable intellectual sounding board.

Bin Laden’s two daughters took notes on the family meetings, which show bin Laden, his older wives and his adult children puzzling over the striking absence from the uprisings of al Qaeda’s ideas and followers. A family member asked bin Laden, “How come there is no mention of al Qaeda?” Bin Laden answered concisely and a tad defensively, “Some analysts do mention al Qaeda.”

Bin Laden complained to his family that he had released a public statement as far back as 2004 urging his followers to “hold Arab rulers accountable” and that his intervention had been ignored. Umm Hamza said, “Maybe your statement is one of the reasons for the Arab Spring uprisings?” But, of course, it was not. Even bin Laden’s family members were dimly aware of the fact. One of them observed of the Arab Spring’s largely peaceful revolutions, “Is it going to have a negative impact that this happened without jihad?”

On March 10, 2011, bin Laden prompted his older wives and two adult daughters for their insights: “I would like to know your comments on what you saw on the news that you were watching this afternoon,” he said. Bin Laden’s kitchen cabinet told him that he needed to make a big speech for public release. The family firmly believed that bin Laden’s words could change the trajectory of the Arab Spring.

An apology to Muslims.

As part of his public outreach, bin Laden was seriously considering releasing some kind of apology on behalf of al Qaeda and its allies. Not an apology, of course, to the hated Americans. Rather, bin Laden was acutely conscious that since 9/11, groups allied with al Qaeda—for example, al Qaeda in Iraq, al Shabaab in Somalia and the Taliban in Pakistan—had killed many thousands of Muslim civilians and that these exploits had undercut the notion that al Qaeda was fighting a holy war on behalf of all Muslims.

Now bin Laden thought to reposition al Qaeda in the Islamic world as an organization that did not wantonly kill Muslim civilians. He wrote to a top lieutenant saying that he planned to issue a statement in which he would discuss “starting a new phase to correct the mistakes we made.” So badly tarnished had the brand become in bin Laden’s mind that he even considered changing the group’s name. He was seeking a kinder, gentler al Qaeda.

Bin Laden’s proposed rebranding did not extend, however, to stopping planning for terrorist attacks against American targets. As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached, bin Laden was eager to memorialize the occasion with another spectacular strike. He told his lieutenants that he wanted “effective operations whose impact, God willing, is bigger than that of 9/11.” He explained that killing President Barack Obama was a high priority, but he also had General David Petraeus, at that time the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, in his sights. Bin Laden told his team not to bother with plots against Vice President Joe Biden, whom he considered “totally unprepared” for the post of president.

Friends and foes: Pakistan, the Taliban, Iran.

Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad was not far from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. For this reason among others, many observers surmised that bin Laden must have received some support from Pakistani officials or military officers.

Yet the thousands of pages of documents recovered from bin Laden’s compound contain nothing to back up the idea that bin Laden was protected by Pakistani officials or that he was in communication with them. Quite the reverse: The documents describe the Pakistani army as “apostates” and bemoan “the intense Pakistani pressure on us.” They also include plans for attacks against Pakistani military targets.

Al Qaeda’s leaders did contemplate negotiating a deal with the Pakistani government during the summer of 2010. Representatives of bin Laden’s group reached out to leaders of the Pakistani Taliban, who maintained contacts with Pakistan’s military intelligence service, to see if they could negotiate a ceasefire with the Pakistani government. But these negotiations fizzled without yielding a truce.

“The Iranians are not to be trusted,” bin Laden wrote to a top deputy while several of his family members were in Iran under house arrest.

Relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan, on the other hand, remained close. Apologists for the Taliban claim that the group long ago spurned al Qaeda—a premise crucial to the protracted peace talks with the U.S., which required the Afghan militants to reject al Qaeda in return for a complete withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

But the Abbottabad documents make clear that al Qaeda and the Taliban had no intention of severing their alliance. In fact, al Qaeda maintained friendly relations with the Taliban and cooperated with them on military operations and funding. According to the documents, bin Laden’s group kidnapped an Afghan diplomat in Pakistan, released him for five million dollars in ransom and then, in 2010, paid a branch of the Taliban known as the Haqqani Network “a large amount” of that money. One of the network’s leaders, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is now the number two leader of the Taliban.

The Abbottabad documents also help to clarify al Qaeda’s murky relationship with the Iranian government. Some al Qaeda leaders and bin Laden family members, such as Umm Hamza, lived under house arrest in Iran for a decade after 9/11. The documents contain no evidence to suggest that al Qaeda and Iran ever cooperated on any attacks. Instead they show bin Laden’s intense distrust of the Iranian regime and record some incidents that served to stoke it.

For example, according to a memo that an al Qaeda member sent to bin Laden, Iranian Special Forces dressed in black and wearing masks stormed the detention center in Iran where some bin Laden family members and al Qaeda leaders were being held on March 5, 2010. The soldiers beat the detainees, including members of bin Laden’s group. Around this time bin Laden wrote to a top deputy that “the Iranians are not to be trusted.”

Still in charge but unaware of strategic failure.

After the initial U.S. incursion into Afghanistan, many in the news media and intelligence services imagined that bin Laden was living isolated in a remote cave, cut off from the lieutenants who ran al Qaeda offshoots in his name. The Abbottabad documents instead show that even in the final weeks of his life, al Qaeda’s leader was still managing his organization.

Bin Laden was deeply involved in important personnel decisions and provided strategic advice to his followers in the Middle East and Africa. In 2010, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula nominated a Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, as a possible new leader, but bin Laden nixed the appointment. Leaders of al Qaeda in Yemen suggested establishing an “Islamic State” in Yemen. In an undated memo, bin Laden told them the moment wasn’t ripe, and they acceded to his wishes. In a letter he wrote on August 7, 2010, bin Laden urged the Somali terrorist group al Shabaab not to publicly identify itself as part of al Qaeda, and the group complied.

For all his micromanagement, the bin Laden who emerges from the Abbottabad documents is a leader with no awareness that his signature accomplishment, the 9/11 attacks, had spectacularly backfired. Bin Laden made the common mistake of coming to believe his own propaganda: in his case, that the U.S. was a “paper tiger,” that it would pull out of the Middle East following the 9/11 attacks, and that then its client regimes, such as the one in Saudi Arabia, would fall like dominos.

In fact, following 9/11, the U.S. waged military campaigns against jihadist terrorist groups in seven Muslim countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Though these campaigns were certainly costly—to date, some six trillion dollars, more than 7,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths—they are far from the retreat that bin Laden anticipated. After 9/11, American bases proliferated throughout the region, while al Qaeda—“the Base” in Arabic—lost the best base it ever had in Afghanistan.

Only now, two decades after 9/11, is the U.S. finally pulling out of Afghanistan and to some degree Iraq—countries where bin Laden never envisaged a U.S. presence. At the same time, the U.S. continues to maintain substantial bases in countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The 9/11 attacks didn’t end the U.S. presence in the Middle East; they greatly amplified it.

Osama bin Laden was one of the few individuals who can be said to have changed the course of history, but the results were not at all what he had hoped for. In 2011, as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached, his overriding goal was to carry out another spectacular terrorist attack against the U.S. He died knowing that he had failed.

This essay is adapted from Mr. Bergen’s new book, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden,” which will be published by Simon & Schuster on August 3. He is a vice president at New America, a professor at Arizona State University and a national security analyst at CNN.

Mandating vaccines for the military would send a powerful message, CNN.com

“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 senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and the author of the forthcoming book, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)A Category 5 Covid hurricane is making landfall in the United States, and the Biden administration must use every tool in its toolkit to blunt its impact — especially if the country is to weather a storm that will likely intensify in the fall should preventative measures not be taken now.

Patients who have contracted the Delta variant of the coronavirus are filling up intensive care units in states such as Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Mississippi — and beyond.

And the reason is simple. The dangerous Delta variant is spreading about 55% faster than the original strain, and it now makes up over 80% of the cases in the United States. Yet, despite this risk, only half of Americans are fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, 97% of Covid hospital admissions are of the unvaccinated.

It’s heartening to hear that President Joe Biden will reportedly announce on Thursday that federal employees and contractors will need to be vaccinated or be frequently tested for the virus if they refuse. Biden should issue a similar order to US military personnel, who are not classified as federal employees, but play a critical role in ensuring the nation’s safety and security.

The military can also be an important role model for those Americans who are hesitant about vaccination. According to a 2021 Gallup poll, 69% of Americans have a significant amount of confidence in the US military — far higher than any other US institution, including the White House or Congress.

Yet, as of the start of this month, only 58% of US Marines had been vaccinated. Other services fare better — the Army is 70% vaccinated, while the Navy is at 77%. But these are the men and women who are sworn to protect our nation, and a sizable minority are still refusing the most basic protection they can offer, which is to prevent the spread of the most lethal virus in a century.

While Covid vaccines remain under the US Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization, somewhat limiting the ability of authorities to compel mandatory vaccinations, the world is in the middle of the greatest public health emergency in our lifetimes and full FDA approval is expected as early as this fall.

Taken together, those may be strong enough reasons for Biden to push the legal limits here and order more than 2 million active duty service personnel and reservists to be vaccinated.

As commander in chief, Biden has great authority over the US military. Unlike other federal workers, US servicemen and women swear an oath that they will obey the orders of their commander in chief, which gives the President considerable leeway to issue vaccination orders. And just think about this: If the President can order military operations where troops may die, he surely can order them to take safe and effective vaccines to protect both themselves and their fellow citizens.

After all, much of the military works in close quarters with each other, and they are routinely ordered to take relevant vaccinations if they deploy overseas. For instance, US service personnel who are deployed in the Central Command (CENTCOM) area of operations in the greater Middle East are required to have vaccinations against anthrax, chickenpox, hepatitis and typhoid. Why shouldn’t they be ordered to get vaccinated during a global pandemic when they are at home?

The reason polio no longer paralyzes many thousands of Americans a year is that polio vaccinations became widespread in the United State in 1955 — and the disease was eliminated in the US by the late 1970s. Today, polio lingers on in places such as rural areas of Afghanistan dominated by the Taliban who have banned inoculations. Do vaccine hesitant Americans want to end up on the same side of history as the Taliban?

Bottom line: Compelling vaccinations in the military is not about taking away their rights, but about their obligations to themselves and to others trying to avoid hospitalization or death from a deadly disease.

Around the world, people are begging to be vaccinated, yet in the US, where we have plenty of vaccines, we do not have enough Americans who are willing to take them. Those who are not getting vaccinated are, in effect, free riding off of those who have been vaccinated, since the larger the pool of vaccinated people, the less chance there is for the virus to proliferate.

That free ride must end, and it should begin with the US servicemen and women who are sworn to protect their nation.

CNN’s Peter Bergen: The Rise, Fall and Impact of Osama bin Laden, Commonwealth Club online

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CNN’s Peter Bergen: The Rise, Fall and Impact of Osama bin Laden
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Commonwealth Club
As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, what is the lasting influence of Osama bin Laden? CNN national security analyst and New America Vice President for Global Studies Peter Bergen has been called the world’s leading expert on bin Laden. In his new book, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Bergen provides the first reevaluation of the man responsible for precipitating America’s long wars with al-Qaeda and its descendants, capturing bin Laden in all the dimensions of his life: as a family man, as a zealot, as a battlefield commander, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive.

Thanks to exclusive interviews with family members and associates, and documents unearthed only recently, Bergen’s portrait of bin Laden reveals for the first time who he really was and why he continues to inspire a new generation of jihadists.

Join a fascinating conversation about the man who set the course of American foreign policy for the 21st century and whose ideological heirs the U.S. continues to battle today.
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Peter Bergen
Journalist; Documentary Producer; CNN National Security Analyst; Vice president for Global studies & Fellow, New America; Author, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden
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In Conversation with Brian Fishman
Director, Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations, Facebook; Former Researcher, New America; Former Director of Research, Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point
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The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, New America online

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In The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Peter Bergen provides the first reevaluation of the man responsible for precipitating America’s long wars with al-Qaeda and its descendants, capturing bin Laden in all the dimensions of his life: as a family man, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive. The book sheds light on his many contradictions: he was the son of a billionaire, yet insisted his family live like paupers. He adored his wives and children, yet he brought ruin to his family. And while he inflicted the most lethal act of mass murder in United States history, he failed to achieve any of his strategic goals.

“A compelling, nuanced portrait of America’s erstwhile public enemy No. 1… Throughout, Bergen turns up revealing details and sharp arguments against received wisdom… Essential for anyone concerned with geopolitics, national security, and the containment of further terrorist actions.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling.” — H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World

Join the International Security Program, Peter Bergen, and Candace Rondeaux for a discussion on the life and legacy of Osama bin Laden.

Follow the conversation @NewAmericaISP and via #RiseandFall on Twitter.

Speakers:

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, Global Studies & Fellows at New America
Author, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

Candace Rondeaux, @CandaceRondeaux (moderator)
Director, Future Frontlines at New America
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

Copies of The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden are available for purchase here through our bookselling partner Solid State Books.

The worst speech of Biden’s presidency, CNN.com

“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 author of the forthcoming book “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed here are his own. View more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)On Thursday President Joe Biden spoke in defense of his ill-considered, hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, in remarks peopled with straw men and littered with false assertions.
First, Biden contended that he was bound by a 2020 Trump administration agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all US troops by May 2021. But that was an agreement conducted by a previous administration — so it’s not binding — and it was predicated on the Taliban breaking with al-Qaeda.
They didn’t, according to the UN in a report released just last month.

It was also predicated on the Taliban engaging with the Afghan government in real peace negotiations.

They haven’t, according to Abdullah Abdullah, an Afghan official who leads the High Council for National Reconciliation. He told CNN a week ago that there has been “very little progress” in those negotiations.

A comparison with the Iranian nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, is instructive. It was negotiated by the Obama administration with a sovereign government and was a deal that, after it was consummated in 2015, was being observed by the Iranians: they were not enriching nuclear fuel, according to both international inspectors and the US intelligence community.
That deal was also brokered, together, with three of the US’s closest allies, Britain, France and Germany.

Yet, the Trump administration pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, while Biden is now honoring an agreement with an insurgent/terrorist group that is not abiding by the terms of the deal that was negotiated last year by the Trump team.

Second, Biden claimed in his speech that the US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, would “work vigorously” for a negotiated solution between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

This is a fanciful notion, as this is the same Zalmay Khalilzad who, while working under the Trump administration, ceded much of Afghanistan to the Taliban with the “peace” negotiations he spearheaded — based on the farcical premise the Taliban would renounce al Qaeda and also engage with real peace talks with the Afghan government. In any event, Afghanistan leaders accused Khalilzad of cutting them out of his negotiations with the Taliban. Trump administration officials denied the allegations.

The Khalilzad-led peace process hasn’t worked for the past three years. Why would it suddenly work now?

Third, Biden said that the US can’t be in Afghanistan “indefinitely,” yet there are some 28,000 US troops in South Korea three-quarters of a century after the end of the Korean War, because the US has a strategic interest in defending the country against the nuclear armed North Korean despot, Kim Jong Un.

So too, the US could have left its 2,500 troops in place in Afghanistan, a force that is less than 10% of the American service personnel in South Korea, to enable the Afghan government to fight the Taliban and its jihadist allies, such as al Qaeda.

Fourth, Biden speciously implied that if the US has troops in Afghanistan then somehow it won’t be strong enough to “meet the strategic competition with China and other nations.”

The US military consists of 1.3 million active-duty personnel and yet it can’t leave 2,500 troops in Afghanistan? To use a trademark Biden expression: C’mon man!

After his speech, Biden told reporters that it’s “highly unlikely” that the Taliban will take over Afghanistan, which is not what his own intelligence community is warning.

Biden also claimed that Afghanistan has never been unified, an odd assertion when a united Afghanistan has existed since 1747, making it older than the United States.

In response to a question about whether he saw any parallels between this withdrawal and the US exit from Vietnam in 1975, the President asserted “none whatsoever.” He went on to say that “There’s going to be no circumstance for you to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” yet an urgent evacuation is exactly one of the contingencies US military planners are preparing for, a senior defense official with knowledge of the planning process told CNN.

To use another trademark Biden expression, his Afghanistan speech was a bunch of malarkey.

The many US blunders that contributed to looming disaster in Afghanistan, CNN.com

Updated 4:10 PM ET, Sun July 4, 2021

(CNN) On Friday, the last US soldiers left Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, which was once home to tens of thousands of American troops.

An additional 7,000 NATO troops are pulling out, as well as approximately 6,000 American contractors, some of whom have been critical to maintaining the helicopters and planes of the Afghan air force. With only 650 US troops remaining to guard the US embassy in Kabul, the United States is leaving the Afghan government to fend for itself against Taliban forces.

The headline in Saturday’s New York Times trumpeted, “US departs last Afghanistan base, effectively ending 20 years of war.” But this headline is a classic example of the misguided idea that withdrawing American troops will usher in peace.

In fact, the Afghan War is likely about to escalate. Even the commander of US troops in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, said publicly on Tuesday that Afghanistan faces the possibility of a disastrous civil war. The withdrawal of US troops effectively hands the Taliban a long-awaited victory as it gains increasing control in Afghanistan. More than a quarter of the country’s 421 districts have already been captured by the Taliban, and the US intelligence community has concluded that the Afghan government could collapse just six months after the American forces are gone.

In the words of the French statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, “This is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.”

But this blunder has been a long time coming; every US president since George W. Bush has either tried to limit the American role in Afghanistan, or to get out entirely.

The only thing that’s been consistent about the US approach in Afghanistan has been its inconsistency. There have been well-publicized talks within the White House about pulling out of Afghanistan for more than half a decade. And there have been years of futile “peace” talks with members of the Taliban, who have gained more at the negotiating table than they ever won on the battlefield. Those negotiations were also conducted almost entirely without any input from democratically elected Afghan governments.

And now, after 20 years of war, the US leaves Afghanistan on the brink of where it all started: with the Taliban seemingly poised to control much of Afghanistan.

Shortly after 9/11, the Bush administration sent a small contingent of US Special Forces and CIA officers into Afghanistan to root out the al-Qaeda leaders who’d planned the attack on the US. Backed by massive US airpower and allied to large Afghan militias, they overthrew the Taliban in just three months.

It was one of the great victories of American unconventional warfare, but securing the peace proved harder than overthrowing the regime, a lesson that the US would relearn in Iraq in 2003 (Bush again) and in Libya in 2011 (this time, President Barack Obama).

After the overthrow of the Taliban, then-US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who died on Tuesday, wanted to keep a small footprint in Afghanistan. The initial deployment of American soldiers to Afghanistan was one of the smallest per capita peacekeeping forces of any US post-conflict deployment since World War II.

Rumsfeld was also fixated on Iraq. On December 12, 2001 the very same day that Rumsfeld was being briefed on the recently updated plan to invade Iraq — al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden escaped during the battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan.

By 2007, it was clear that the Taliban were regrouping in Afghanistan. There was an epidemic of suicide bombings and by the time President Barack Obama took office in 2009, what was seen as “the good war” — as opposed to the misguided Iraq War –was going badly.

On December 1, 2009, Obama traveled to the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, to deliver a key speech of his presidency. There, he announced 30,000 new troops would surge into Afghanistan, but news coverage focused on the fact that Obama promised to start bringing them home in mid-2011.

For the Taliban, the takeaway from Obama’s speech was not the surge of troops, but the withdrawal date.

Towards the end of his second term, Obama seriously considered following through on his promise to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan. After all, he had run on a pledge of drawing down from America’s wars.

But the fiasco that had unfolded in Iraq after US troops were pulled out in 2011 (an operation then-Vice President Joe Biden oversaw) loomed over any discussion of the Afghan drawdown. What happened in Iraq contributed to a vacuum that gave rise to the Islamic State (ISIS), and no one wanted a repeat of that in Afghanistan.

While Obama wanted to withdraw, that would have left his successor, Donald J. Trump, with little flexibility for maneuver. In the last few months of his presidency, Obama announced a force of 8,400 troops would remain in Afghanistan.

The most contentious foreign policy decision of Trump’s first year in office was what to do about Afghanistan. On one side there was the “America First” camp that included Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon, who wanted to pull out US troops. On the other were those like National Security Adviser Lt. General H.R. McMaster, who believed that putting more US troops in Afghanistan would prevent a Taliban takeover that would lead Afghanistan to play host to al-Qaeda and other jihadist terrorist groups.

Trump remained convinced that Afghanistan was a futile endeavor, but he was persuaded by McMaster and the Pentagon that the only thing worse than staying in Afghanistan was leaving it entirely.
Trump called for an increase of troops in Afghanistan and the number of US forces grew to 14,000 by late 2017. But Trump was never comfortable with this decision and in his final months in office he announced all US troops would leave Afghanistan by Christmas 2020. That benchmark came and went and Trump left at least 2,500 troops in the country while his administration made a deal with the Taliban to withdraw completely by May 2021.

It was ultimately Biden’s decision to finish the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Could there have been another way? Perhaps. It could have been more politically and financially sustainable to “go light and go long” in Afghanistan, keeping several thousand US troops in the country focused on counterterrorism operations and supporting the Afghan military, while emphasizing the US’ commitment to stay in Afghanistan long-term. That commitment would have boosted the morale of the Afghan government and military and undercut the Taliban’s view that they could simply wait out the Americans — which they have done.

Now that Biden has finally done what two previous presidents have seriously considered, the likely result is that Afghanistan will descend into an intense civil war — and every jihadist terrorist group in the world will find a congenial home in the ensuing chaos.

The foreign policy crisis on Joe Biden’s doorstep, CNN.com

CNN Wire

June 24, 2021 Thursday 10:09 AM GMT

Length: 1234 words

Byline: Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Dateline: (CNN)

The two top officials in Afghanistan are meeting Friday with President Joe Biden at a moment when much of their country is in danger of being swallowed up by the Taliban.

The meeting with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, comes after a report by the US Congressional Research Service released earlier this month that concluded, “By many measures, the Taliban are in a stronger military position now than at any point since 2001.”

In the past days, the Taliban have launched a major offensive in northern Afghanistan far from their traditional strongholds in the south and east of the country.

Habiba Sarabi, an Afghan government negotiator engaging in talks with the Taliban, told CNN, “With the imminent removal of all United States forces in just a few weeks, the Taliban are moving rapidly, resulting in a swift deterioration in the security environment. We were caught off guard by the scale and scope of setbacks in the north.”

The United States has contributed to the deteriorating security situation by consistently saying for more than a decade that it is leaving Afghanistan, which has undermined the Afghan government and strengthened the resolve of the Taliban who have won at the negotiating table from the Americans what they failed to win on the battlefield.

Without swift action by the Biden administration we could see in Afghanistan a remix of the disastrous US pullout from Saigon in 1975 and the summer of 2014 in Iraq when ISIS took over much of the country following the US pullout from the country three years earlier. That withdrawal was negotiated by then-vice president Biden.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, assesses that the Taliban now control 25 per cent of the Afghan population, while the government controls 40 per cent of the population, and just over a third of Afghans live in regions that are contested between the Taliban and the government

The Taliban have seized 50 of the country’s 370 districts since May, according to the United Nations.

The premise of the many years of US-Taliban negotiations has been that the United States will draw down militarily in exchange for the Taliban severing relations with al-Qaeda — the terrorist organization it harbored at the time of the planning and execution of the terrorist attacks against the US on September 11, 2001.

This has been, to put it charitably, a charade, according to the United Nations, which reported just this month that the two groups remain “closely aligned and show no signs of breaking ties.” The UN report notes that Taliban-al Qaeda ties have actually “grown deeper.”

Meanwhile, US presidents going back to Barack Obama have consistently said the United States is leaving Afghanistan, but in the end, Obama left 8,400 troops when he completed his second term. Donald Trump also wanted to go to zero, but he left at least 2,500 soldiers.

In both the case of Obama and Trump, the Pentagon made the case that leaving a relatively small number of troops in Afghanistan acted as an insurance policy to prevent the Taliban taking over much of the country.

Now comes Biden, who has promised to go to zero troops by the 20th anniversary of 9/11; a more inappropriate end-date for the US presence would be hard to conjure.

The withdrawal of all US troops means that America’s NATO allies in Afghanistan are also pulling the plug. There were 7,000 allied troops in the country when Biden announced he was going to zero, but now they are also all heading for the exits.

After Biden’s announcement, the Australians decided to close their embassy in Kabul. Other countries will likely follow.

The Biden administration has said that some six thousand American contractors will have to leave Afghanistan as well.

This move completely undercuts the Afghan Air Force, which has capable pilots but relies on American contractors to service the complex helicopters and aircraft it has been given by the US government. Without those contractors the Afghan Air Force will be effectively grounded and the Afghan government would lose a key military advantage over the Taliban.

The US is also leaving in the lurch the many thousands of Afghans who have helped the US military. The nonprofit, No One Left Behind, has documented more than 300 cases since 2014 in which Afghans who had worked with the US military or their family members were killed by militant groups in Afghanistan.

Eighteen thousand Afghans who have worked with the US military are now seeking visas to leave Afghanistan for the United States as they quite reasonably fear for their lives, but these visas are generally taking many years to process. They also don’t account for a further 53,000 of their family members who are also trying to flee the wrath of the Taliban.

All this comes at a time when the Biden administration is admitting the lowest number of refugees in American history, even fewer than Trump, according to a report by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) that was released in April. The IRC found that the Biden administration will likely admit only around 4,000 refugees from around the entire world this fiscal year.

And, of course, all the hard-won gains made by women and minorities in Afghanistan over the past two decades now stand to be lost.

The Hazaras, a long-discriminated against minority in Afghanistan because of their Shia religion, make up around 15 per cent of the population. They were massacred by Taliban forces before 9/11, according to Human Rights Watch. The Taliban, which is largely made up of the Pashtun ethnic group, continue to attack Hazaras, as does the local branch of ISIS.

Hazaras are now arming themselves in anticipation of a return to the ethnic civil war that wracked Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.

Afghan women are understandably frightened that as the Taliban assert their power they will lose their rights to work and to be educated.

So how might anything be salvaged from this mess?

First, American contractors who are willing to stay in Afghanistan to service the planes and helicopters of the Afghan air force should be allowed to stay. Those contractors could be secured by elite Afghan commando forces.

Second, Afghans who have helped the US military must have their visas processed expeditiously, even if it means doing so in neighboring countries such as Pakistan. And if the visas can’t be issued in a timely fashion, the US government should have a plan to evacuate the thousands of Afghans whose lives may be at risk.

Third, Turkish troops must be allowed to continue to maintain security at Kabul airport. Turkey has long secured the key airport as part of its NATO duties and without security forces at the airport the United States and other nations will likely have to end their diplomatic presence as will international aid organizations, which would be in no one’s interests, including the Taliban who understand how dependent Afghanistan is on international support.

Fourth, the United States should make clear to the Taliban that it will intervene militarily in Afghanistan using airstrikes if the Taliban don’t sustain their agreements to sever ties with al-Qaeda and engage in genuine peace negotiations with the Afghan government.

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst