Suli Forum, Sulaymaniyah, Iraq

“Al Qa’ida’s Contested Relationship With Iran: The View from Abottabad.” New America, DC

September 7, 2018

New America holds a discussion on a report titled “Al Qa’ida’s Contested Relationship With Iran: The View from Abottabad.”

SECTION: DISCUSSION; ||IRAN/SECURITY|| Foreign Affairs

LENGTH: 81 words

TIME: 12:15 p.m.

PARTICIPANTS: Nelly Lahoud, senior fellow at the New America International Security Program and author of “Iran and Al Qa’ida”; and Peter Bergen, vice president of New America and director of the New America International Security Program

LOCATION: New America, 740 15th Street NW, Suite 900, Washington, D.C.

It’s Trump’s war … and it’s not going well, CNN.com

It’s Trump’s war … and it’s not going well

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 writing a book about the Trump administration’s national security decision-making.

(CNN)One year ago, President Donald Trump announced what he said was his new strategy for the Afghan war.

He said he had become convinced that the only thing worse than staying in Afghanistan was pulling out.

In a rare admission that he had changed his mind, Trump said: “My original instinct was to pull out, and historically, I like following my instincts. But all my life I’ve heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.”

Trump said he was making an indefinite commitment to remain in Afghanistan, and would not replicate what he said was the Obama administration’s mistake in prematurely pulling out of Iraq at the end of 2011, which helped create a vacuum that led to the rise of ISIS.

Trump also said he would not do what Obama had done in announcing withdrawal dates even as he surged troops into Afghanistan. “Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on,” Trump said.

This was the right call, but now the Afghan war is truly Trump’s war. It is not going well.

The US Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that in early 2018 the Afghan government controlled more than half of the districts in the country, while the Taliban controlled around 15%.

The remaining third of Afghanistan was contested between government forces and the Taliban.

After 17 years of war, the fact that the Taliban controls or contests almost half of the districts in the country is sobering. This month the Taliban launched a large-scale attack on the strategically important city of Ghazni and held it for five days. Ghazni sits on the Kabul-to-Kandahar road, the most important highway in the country.

ISIS has also established itself in Afghanistan, and now routinely attacks the Shia minority, like the attack on a Shia educational facility in Kabul that killed 34 students on Wednesday.

A year ago Trump promised a tougher line against Pakistan, Afghanistan’s neighbor, which has long supported elements of the Taliban. He said, “No partnership can survive a country’s harboring of militants and terrorists who target US service members and officials.”

According to Shamila Chaudhary, a fellow at the think tank New America who worked as director for Pakistan on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, “The primary action Trump has taken in his effort to get tougher on Pakistan was to cut most US security assistance to Pakistan earlier this year. That being said, the levels of security assistance were going down anyway since the Obama administration.”

So far there hasn’t been much evidence that the US is really going to get tough on Pakistan, which would involve sanctioning specific Pakistani officials or even designating it as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The reason is pretty simple: Afghanistan is a landlocked country surrounded by countries that are not well-disposed to the US such as Iran, and some former Soviet republics that remain aligned with Russia, and China.

That leaves only Pakistan as a somewhat reliable ally, which means that resupplying the 15,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan requires Pakistani roads and airspace. If the American presence remains substantial in Afghanistan, Pakistan will always be a necessary partner. Michael Kugelman, a Pakistan expert at the Wilson Center, observes, “The main U.S. fear has been that Pakistan could shut down the NATO supply routes on its soil.”

The United States has sent some of its most capable military leaders to oversee the Afghan war, such as the generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus. The commander of Joint Special Operation Command who oversees US commando operations, Lt. General Scott Miller, will soon take the helm in Afghanistan, replacing the equally capable John “Mick” Nicholson, who has arguably spent more time in Afghanistan than any other US military officer.

The Afghan war is unlikely to be won on the battlefield. The Taliban haven’t been defeated in 17 years despite enormous pressure, including Obama’s “surge” of troops into Afghanistan during his first term. There were around 100,000 US troops in the country in the early years of Obama first term and they didn’t defeat the Taliban. Today, there are some 15,000 troops.

As of July, the Trump administration is reportedly talking to the Taliban directly, seemingly because there is an understanding that decisive battlefield success will continue to be elusive. These talks happened without Afghan government representation, which has long been a Taliban demand: To speak directly with the American government.

There is little to lose by such talks; even if they yield nothing they allow the US to gather intelligence on the Taliban and perhaps even create splits in the movement between potential doves and hawks.
That said, expectations for these talks should be low; the Taliban are hardly going to put down their arms when they are doing relatively well on the battlefield, nor have they articulated a concrete vision of what they really want for Afghanistan, beyond the expulsion of foreign troops.

On Sunday Afghan President Ashraf Ghani announced a ceasefire to mark the Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday, a several-day truce that the Taliban have provisionally agreed to. The Ghani government hopes that the ceasefire might run for as long as three months.

Which brings us to politics. In 2019 there will be another Afghan presidential election. The past two such elections were fiascos with innumerable, credible accounts of fraud by all sides. This must not happen again, as a badly flawed presidential election damages the credibility of all Afghan institutions.

The Trump administration should be clear with all the key political players in Afghanistan that it will not tolerate another botched presidential election and such a result might end any American support to Afghanistan.

At the same time the US government and its NATO allies in Afghanistan must invest enormous effort in ensuring that the elections are free enough and fair enough to ensure a credible Afghan government emerges in 2019.

Without that, everything else that the US does in Afghanistan is mostly a waste of time.

Trump is picking on the wrong guy, CNN.com

Trump is picking on the wrong guy
Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 12:21 PM ET, Thu August 16, 2018

“Peter Bergen, is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the author of “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad.””

(CNN)President Trump is picking on the wrong guy if he thinks the revocation of John Brennan’s security clearances is going to intimidate or silence him. The man who is in many ways the architect of the war on militant jihadists is not going to be easily bullied.

Former CIA director Brennan is not just any critic of Trump: unlike many others, he doesn’t come from the left. In fact, Brennan is the engineer of some of the most aggressive American efforts to eliminate jihadist terrorists.

In person, Brennan, who grew up in a devout Catholic working class family in New Jersey, is serious, even stern, not big on small talk and intolerant of BS.

President Barack Obama trusted Brennan deeply on counterterrorism issues and Brennan played an important role in the decision to carry out the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.

Key Obama Cabinet officials, such as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Vice President Joe Biden, advocated against authorizing a US Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan because of all the risks involved in such an operation, which were compounded by only circumstantial evidence that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad.

By contrast, Brennan urged a go on the raid. He told the Obama that the CIA officials who had developed the intelligence on Abbottabad were, as he recalled in an interview with me later, “the people that have been following bin Laden for 15 years. This has been their life’s work, this has been their life’s journey, and they feel it very much in their gut that bin Laden is at that compound. I feel pretty good, if not certain, that bin Laden is at that compound.”

On the morning of April 29, 2011 at the White House Brennan again strongly recommended the SEAL operation, just before Obama gave the final order to authorize the raid.

A fluent Arabic speaker who was CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia before 9/11, Brennan was tapped in 2003 by George W. Bush to run the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), which was the first post-9/11 effort to “connect the dots” of all American intelligence flows. TTIC was set up to avoid what happened on 9/11 when information about two of the hijackers that was known to the CIA was not shared with the FBI in a timely fashion.

This improved intelligence-sharing was a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.

In January 2009, Obama made Brennan his homeland security and counterterrorism adviser.

From a windowless office with low ceilings in the basement of the West Wing of the White House, Brennan oversaw a vast expansion of the covert US drone program, which put significant pressure on al Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan and Yemen.

In 2008, during President George W. Bush’s final year in office, there were 36 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. In 2010, during Obama’s second year in office, there were 122 drone strikes in Pakistan, according to New America data.

During Bush’s two terms, there was only one CIA drone strike in Yemen, while in 2012, there were 56, according to the New America data.

Obama subsequently made Brennan director of the CIA in 2013, and he served for four years. Today, Brennan is back at Fordham as a senior fellow where he once studied as an undergraduate. (I am also a fellow at Fordham’s Center on National Security.)

Brennan is already firing back at Trump in the New York Times, writing, “Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion [with the Russians] are, in a word, hogwash.” This is a serious charge coming from a former director of the CIA.

Trump just picked on the wrong guy.

Attack of the assassin drones, CNN.com

Attack of the assassin drones

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, and Melissa Salyk-Virk

Source: CNN

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the co-editor of “Drone Wars.” Melissa Salyk-Virk is a policy analyst at New America. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors. View more opinion articles on CNN.”

(CNN)On Saturday, President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela was giving a speech in Caracas when two armed drones exploded nearby — one detonating in the air and another inside an apartment building, authorities said.

President Maduro blamed far-right political opponents for what he called an attempted assassination. Six people have been arrested.
The apparent attack raises the question: Could a drone assassination work? This would certainly change the way governments handle security for heads of state in public events. It also has implications for the security of overseas military bases and embassies.

The global proliferation of drones

New America tracks the proliferation of armed drones in a “World of Drones” database. Ten countries are known to have used drones in combat.
Video appears to show drone in alleged attack

The United States was the first to use armed drones after the 9/11 attacks. Since then, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom have all used armed drones in combat.

It was President Barack Obama who dramatically increased the use of armed drones against suspected terrorists in countries that the United States is not at war with, such as Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

A number of countries have used drones to assassinate their own citizens. Both the United States and the United Kingdom have conducted strikes against their own citizens overseas, while Israel has done so in the Palestinian territories. Countries such as Nigeria, Turkey, Pakistan, and Iraq have conducted drone strikes within their own borders.
Another 19 countries have armed drones but have not used them in combat.

Several terrorist and rebel groups have also used drones both for surveillance and to carry out attacks, including ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Lebanese group Hezbollah was the first nonstate actor to use military-grade drones for surveillance, and has also used armed drones in Syria.

The Palestinian group Hamas has also acquired military-grade unmanned aircrafts, while ISIS has created improvised weapons by attaching explosives to over-the-counter drone models. The Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have used unmanned vessels to attack Saudi Arabian ships.

Which countries produce armed drones?

Because of human rights concerns, until this year the United States sold its armed drones only to close allies, such as Britain, France and Italy.
This has helped enable China to become a top armed drone supplier. Israel is another leading exporter of armed drones.

China is not a party of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), which was created to limit the proliferation of missiles, missile technology, and other weapons of mass destruction. Because China has not ratified this agreement, it does not have as many restrictions for its exports, thus Chinese drone sales have boomed.

In April, the Trump administration announced a new policy to allow the sale of armed drones to more countries.

President Donald Trump said that this new policy was meant to boost sales for the American defense industry. But it will also likely mean that regulators give less scrutiny to the risk of buyers committing human rights abuses with these weapons.

The tipping point

The rapid proliferation of armed drones poses novel questions for national security.

The Chinese are testing “swarms” of drones working together powered by artificial intelligence. This kind of technology will help to reshape conventional warfare between states.
At the same time, as truck and car bombs reshaped terrorism in the 20th century, armed, crude drones in the hands of terrorist groups and even lone actors are likely to reshape terrorism in the 21st century.

The man who tried to stop 9/11, CNN.com

The man who tried to stop 9/11

By Peter Bergen CNN National Security Analyst

Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, the chairman of the Global Special Operations Foundation and the author of five books about terrorism.

(CNN) — At a time when our public life is full of acrimony and there is scant discussion of the common good and the merits of service, the life of Michael Sheehan reminds us of these virtues.

It’s hard to think of a public servant who fought the war against al Qaeda and other jihadist groups for longer and with greater tenacity than Sheehan.

Over the course of the past two decades, Sheehan worked in senior national security positions at the State Department, the Pentagon, the United Nations, the New York Police Department and at West Point.

Sheehan died last Monday at age 63 after many years of battling multiple myeloma.

In December 1998, just months after al Qaeda had launched suicide bombings at two US embassies in Africa, killing more than 200 people, Sheehan was tapped for the job of counterterrorism coordinator at the State Department. (It was during this period that I first came to know and admire Sheehan.)

His job as ambassador for counterterrorism put Sheehan at the center of the fight against al Qaeda. The Taliban were then hosting Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Sheehan was given wide latitude by his boss, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, to confront them.

Sheehan, an intense, blunt, wiry former Special Forces officer universally known as Mike, dispatched a strongly worded cable to Taliban leaders that said they would “be held fully accountable” for another attack by al Qaeda.

In early 2000, Sheehan followed that up with a 45-minute phone call with the Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Muttawakil, during which he read him a unambiguous statement: “We will hold the Taliban leadership responsible for any attacks against US interests by al Qaeda or any of its affiliated groups.”

Sheehan later recalled that Muttawakil “went through his long list of talking points, which I’d heard all before. Number one was: ‘We have bin Laden under control. He’s not going to do anything else.'”

Sheehan pushed back against the Taliban foreign minister, telling him a story to illustrate the American position: “If we’re neighbors on a block, and you have bin Laden in your basement, and at night he’s coming out and setting fire to the other houses on the block and then going back into your basement, you are accountable now, because you are harboring that guy.”

After the 9/11 attacks, this was the doctrine the Bush administration would use when it launched a war against the Taliban because they were harboring bin Laden.

In the years before 9/11, Sheehan was also battling the Air Force and the CIA over Predator drones that he wanted to deploy to hunt for bin Laden. Sheehan recalled, “This was another huge frustration. They had more Predators flying around in the Balkans than they had over Afghanistan at that time, which really frustrated me because I was working on both programs and, quite frankly, I thought bin Laden was a much higher priority.”

On October 12, 2000, al Qaeda dispatched two suicide bombers to attack the USS Cole, anchored off the port of Aden in Yemen. 17 American sailors were killed in the blast, which almost sunk the warship.

The Clinton administration, which was about to complete its second term in office, did nothing to respond to this act of war.

Sheehan was enormously frustrated, exclaiming to his close friend Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism coordinator, “Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”

This would prove to be a prescient observation since the Bush administration also did nothing to respond to the Cole attack after it assumed office, and it was only after al Qaeda attacked both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 9/11 that the Bush administration responded.

After the 9/11 attacks, Sheehan worked for two years as an assistant secretary general at the United Nations, where he oversaw more than 40,000 military and police peacekeepers.

In 2003, Sheehan joined the New York Police Department as the deputy commissioner in charge of counterterrorism, which was in many ways one of the most important national security jobs in the country, because Manhattan remained a key target for terrorists.

After three years managing counterterrorism in New York, in 2006 Sheehan retired from government service. An enormously energetic man, Sheehan took on several jobs, working as an analyst for NBC News, as a fellow both at NYU’s Center for Law and Security and at West Point’s Counterterrorism Center and as a partner in Torch Hill Equity.

Sheehan also wrote an important book about terrorism, “Crush The Cell,” which was published in 2008, seven years after the 9/11 attacks.

In the book, Sheehan pushed back against those politicians and commentators who were overplaying the threat posed by terrorists writing, “We must remember that they’re not everywhere and they’re not all-powerful. They have limitations — personal, organizational, and ideological — and they’ve proven their limits by their inability to attack the United States again since 9/11.”

The book was dedicated to his wife, Sita, his daughter, Alexandra, and his son, Michael.

In 2011 Sheehan returned to government service to take on what was in many ways his dream job as assistant secretary of defense for special operations. During his Army career, Sheehan had served as a Special Forces officer in Panama. Now he was in charge of all Special Operations Forces deployed around the world and their fight against al Qaeda and other jihadist groups.

Even in this role, Sheehan remained a skeptic of those who wanted to inflate the threat posed by terrorists, telling a group of counterterrorism experts in New York in 2013: “If you allow the terrorists to be 10 feet tall and allow their small attacks to represent strategic threats to the US, you empower them. So it’s important to understand the nature of the threat and how dangerous it is, but not to exaggerate it, because that plays into their hands. That’s what they want you to do. So that requires some nuance, which is, of course, not a great quality of discourse in Washington.”

Sheehan, a 1977 graduate of West Point, remained a senior fellow at West Point’s Counterterrorism Center until he died.

His final project was a gift to his beloved West Point. Sheehan recruited some of the nation’s leading counterterrorism practitioners and thinkers to contribute chapters to a book that will be given to all West Point cadets, titled “Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare: The Long War Against Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their Affiliates.”

The book will now be dedicated to Sheehan.

TM & © 2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.

Osama bin Laden’s mother breaks her long silence, CNN.com

Osama bin Laden’s mother breaks her long silence
Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 10:47 PM ET, Fri August 3, 2018

“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 four books about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.”

(CNN)For the first time, Osama bin Laden’s mother, Alia Ghanem, has given an interview. Conducted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, by Martin Chulov of The Guardian, the interview is noteworthy because bin Laden, the architect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and his mother were exceptionally close.

What Ghanem says in the interview is largely credible and tracks with the little that is publicly known about her relationship with her son. Ghanem recalls bin Laden as “a very good kid and he loved me so much.”

According to Ghanem, who is now in her mid-70s, she was divorced from Mohammed bin Laden, the enormously wealthy bin Laden family patriarch, when Osama was three. Osama was the only child of their union.

Mohammed bin Laden had 53 other children with some 20 wives. He died in a plane crash when Osama was 10.

After his parents’ divorce, Ghanem’s second husband, Mohammed al-Attas, raised Osama.

Ghanem and her family live in a well-to-do section of Jeddah, a testament to the fact that the bin Laden construction business is one of the largest in the Middle East.

According to The Guardian, Ghanem is speaking out for the first time because the Saudi government, led by the 32-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, allowed the interview. The Saudi interest in permitting the interview is clear: They want to make the argument that bin Laden received no Saudi state support, despite the claims in an ongoing lawsuit by some of the families of the 9/11 victims. And, the newspaper noted, a Saudi government minder sat in during the interview.

The case remains unresolved, but there is little hard evidence that the Saudi state supported bin Laden. After all, bin Laden’s principal goal was overthrowing the Saudi monarchy.

In the interview with The Guardian, bin Laden’s mother blames outsiders such as bin Laden’s Palestinian mentor, Abdullah Azzam, who purportedly “brainwashed” her son and converted him to jihadism when bin Laden was a young man in his 20s fighting in the “holy war” in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the mid-1980s.

Azzam was killed by an assassin in Pakistan in 1989. While he was certainly bin Laden’s mentor, he was not focused on attacking the United States.

Bin Laden’s mother confirmed to The Guardian that she is an Alawite from Syria. Alawism is a branch of Shia Islam. This had long been suspected, but this helps fill in a key aspect of bin Laden’s background. The fact that bin Laden’s beloved mother is an Alawite may help explain why bin Laden never advocated for or fought wars against the Shia, as have other Sunni jihadist groups, such as ISIS.

Ghanem says that within the first 48 hours of the 9/11 attacks, she learned her son Osama was responsible, and said she was “shocked. … We all felt ashamed of him. We knew all of us were going to face horrible consequences.” The bin Ladens were questioned by Saudi authorities and for a period could not leave the country.
Follow CNN Opinion

Ghanem is in regular touch with the three widows of bin Laden who survived the 2011 US Navy SEAL operation that killed al Qaeda’s leader in Abbottabad, Pakistan. They are now living in Saudi Arabia but cannot leave the country.

Bin Laden’s mother allowed herself to be photographed for The Guardian story, which is surprising because the photography of women’s faces in Saudi Arabia is still not common.
The last time that Ghanem said she saw her son was in the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan in 1999, the year after al Qaeda’s attacks on two US embassies in Africa that killed more than 200 people.

Unmentioned in the Guardian interview is that, according to bin Laden’s chief bodyguard, Abu Jandal, bin Laden’s mother went to Kandahar at the behest of the Saudi government in an effort to persuade her son to abandon his life of terrorism.

Bin Laden’s bodyguard recalled that bin Laden treated his mother with great respect but told her he could not stop fighting his jihad: “This is a principle. I keep it in my heart and I have promised God not to abandon it.”

Sarah Sanders is wrong. Bin Laden was wary of satellite phones because he wasn’t an idiot, CNN.com

Sarah Sanders is wrong. Bin Laden was wary of satellite phones because he wasn’t an idiot
Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 4:11 AM ET, Fri August 3, 2018

“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 “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.” ”

(CNN)As part of a systematic effort by the Trump administration to paint the press as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people,” Sarah Sanders trotted out a long-debunked canard about Osama bin Laden at Wednesday’s White House press briefing.

Sanders claimed that “the media routinely reports on classified information and government secrets that put lives in danger and risk valuable national security tools. One of the worst cases was the reporting on the US ability to listen to Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone in the late ’90s. Because of that reporting, he stopped using that phone, and the country lost valuable intelligence.”

Sanders was referring to an August 21, 1998, story in The Washington Times that purportedly tipped off bin Laden that the US government was listening to his satellite phone.

In blaming The Washington Times, Sanders was following in the footsteps of President George W. Bush and the 9/11 Commission. All of them were, and are, wrong.

In fact, bin Laden was careful about using his satellite phone, not because he was glued to his computer reading an obscure American newspaper in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan where there was no internet at the time, but because he wasn’t an idiot.

In early 1997, I visited Khalid al-Fawwaz, an associate of bin Laden’s in London, to arrange an interview with al Qaeda’s leader for CNN.
A year and half before The Washington Times article appeared, Fawwaz volunteered to me that bin Laden communicated by radio and generally avoided using satellite phones “because he was well aware that intelligence agencies could easily monitor satellite phone calls.” Conscious of the security problems of satellite phones, bin Laden would often give his phone to subordinates to make calls.

Al Qaeda’s leaders had also closely followed the April 1996 assassination of Dzhokhar Dudayev, the Chechen leader who was killed by a Russian missile that homed in on the signal of his satellite phone. Bin Laden didn’t need The Washington Times to tell him about the risks associated with talking on a satellite phone.

The fact that bin Laden went off the grid around the time of The Washington Times story is more than likely because the day before it appeared, bin Laden was on the receiving end of a barrage of US cruise missile strikes because al Qaeda had recently bombed two US embassies in Africa, killing more than 200 people.

Bin Laden eluded those strikes, but there’s nothing quite like surviving a barrage of US cruise missiles to get you off your electronic devices!

Counterterrorism in 2020: Future prospects and challenges, Univ of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Counterterrorism in 2020: Future prospects and challenges

WHEN:
Wednesday, October 03, 2018 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm
Location:
Weill Hall, Annenberg Auditorium (1120)
735 S. State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 (

Free and open to the public. Reception to follow.

Join the conversation: #policytalks

This event will be live webstreamed. Check back here just before the event for viewing details.

About the discussion:

Towsley Policymaker in Residence Javed Ali will moderate a panel discussion with three leading counterterrorism experts–Peter Bergen, Barbara McQuade, and Chris Costa. Panel members will share perspectives on the current terrorist threat and how it may evolve by 2020; what potential policy changes and new tools, resources, and authorities may be necessary to combat these threats; whether counterterrorism has receded as a national security priority 17 years after 9/11; and, the importance of partnerships in the global fight against terrorism.

From the speakers’ bios:

Javed Ali is a Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Policymaker in Residence at the Ford School for the fall 2018 semester and a former Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council (NSC). He has over twenty years of professional experience in national security and intelligence issues in Washington, D.C., and began his federal government career in 2002. During that time, Ali worked in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In addition to his role at the NSC, while at the FBI he also held senior positions while on joint duty assignments at the National Intelligence Council and the National Counterterrorism Center. Ali holds a BA in political science from the University of Michigan, a JD from the University of Detroit School of Law, and a MA in international relations from American University.

Peter Bergen is a journalist, documentary producer, Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows at New America, CNN national security analyst, professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the author or editor of seven books about national security and terrorism, 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-one languages. Documentaries based on his books have been nominated for two Emmys and also won the Emmy for best documentary. Bergen is on the editorial board of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, a leading scholarly journal in the field. He has held teaching positions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He has testified before U.S. Congressional committees seventeen times about national security issues. Bergen produced CNN Films’ Legion of Brothers, which premiered at Sundance in January 2017 and was released theatrically in May 2017. Bergen produced the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997. The interview, which aired on CNN, marked the first time that bin Laden declared war against the United States to a Western audience. He has a degree in Modern History from New College, Oxford.

Barbara L. McQuade, BA ’87, JD ’91, is a professor from practice. Her interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, national security, data privacy, and civil rights. From 2010 to 2017, Professor McQuade served as the U.S attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. Appointed by President Barack Obama, she was the first woman to serve in her position. Professor McQuade also served as vice chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee and co-chaired its Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee. As U.S. attorney, she oversaw cases involving public corruption, terrorism, corporate fraud, theft of trade secrets, civil rights, and health care fraud, among others. Before becoming U.S. attorney, Professor McQuade served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Detroit for 12 years, serving as deputy chief of the National Security Unit, where she handled cases involving terrorism financing, export violations, threats, and foreign agents. Professor McQuade began her career as a law clerk for U.S. District Judge Bernard A. Friedman in Detroit, and then practiced law at the firm of Butzel Long in Detroit. Professor McQuade previously taught at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law. Professor McQuade has been recognized by the Detroit Free Press with the Neal Shine Award for Exemplary Regional Leadership, The Detroit News with the Michiganian of the Year Award, Crain’s Detroit Business as a Newsmaker of the Year and one of Detroit’s Most Influential Women, and the Detroit Branch NAACP and Arab American Civil Rights League with their Tribute to Justice Award.

Christopher P. Costa is the executive director of the International Spy Museum and a 34-year veteran of the Department of Defense. He served 25 years in counterintelligence, human intelligence and with special operations forces (SOF) in the United States Army, in Central America, Europe, and throughout the Middle East. He ran a wide range of intelligence and special operations in Panama, Bosnia, the first and second Iraq wars, and Afghanistan. Colonel Costa earned two Bronze stars for sensitive human intelligence work in Afghanistan. Assigned to the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, he served as the first civilian squadron Deputy Director. Costa was inducted into the United States Special Operation’s Commando Hall of Honor for lifetime service to US Special Operations. Most recently, he served as the Special Assistant to the President & Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the White House. As Museum executive director, he is committed to the International Spy Museum’s mission and values.

How long can his war Cabinet tolerate Trump’s farce? CNN.com

How long can his war Cabinet tolerate Trump’s farce?

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“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 “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author; view more opinion articles on CNN.”

(CNN)How much longer can the foreign policy leaders in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet stick by this President?

The Helsinki, Finland, summit will surely go down as one of the worst-ever presidential performances on the international stage. Not since President John F. Kennedy was thoroughly intimidated when he met with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, Austria, in 1961 has an American president been so completely and artfully outflanked by his Russian counterpart.

At a press conference in Helsinki standing next to Russian President Vladimir Putin, instead of endorsing the unanimous finding of US intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, Trump observed that Putin was “extremely strong and powerful in his denial.”

Well, that settles it then! We will always take the word of Putin, a former longtime KGB official whose actions around the world have run counter to American interests, against those of America’s key intelligence agencies.

For good measure, Trump dumped on his own country, “I think that the United States has been foolish. We’ve all been foolish. We’re all to blame.” Really? In fact, as special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has painstakingly revealed, the ones to blame are a small coterie of officers in Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU, acting no doubt under the orders of Putin.
Surely Trump’s performance in Helsinki must have the members of his war Cabinet asking themselves: How can I continue serving in this administration? After all, these are serious public servants, much of whose lives have been bound up in countering first the Soviet threat and now the Russian threat.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis enlisted in the Marine Corps in the late 1960s when he was 18 and when the Cold War was at its height.
During his confirmation hearings to become defense secretary, Mattis described the Russians as the number one threat to the United States and opined that Putin was seeking to break up the NATO alliance.

In the Pentagon’s defense strategy released in January, Mattis again described Russia as a key threat.

This was a similar conclusion to that of the national security strategy review overseen by now-departed national security adviser Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster that was released in December.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s first assignment as an Army officer was patrolling the border between West Germany and East Germany as the Cold War wound down.

At his confirmation hearing for secretary of state, Pompeo said, “Russia continues to act aggressively, enabled by years of soft policy toward that aggression.”

In May, Pompeo said the United States has a “great deal more work to do” to safeguard the November midterm elections from outside interference.

Dan Coats, who oversees the 17 American intelligence agencies, testified in March that Russia “is likely to continue to pursue even more aggressive [cyber] attacks, with the intent of degrading our Democratic values and weakening our alliances.”

After Trump’s bizarre press conference on Monday, Coats’ office released a statement pushing back on the President’s bromance with Putin, saying, “We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy. …”

In the past Trump’s current national security adviser, John Bolton, has called Putin a “liar” and Russia’s election-meddling in 2016 an “act of war.” Bolton has moderated his tone on Russia of late, but clearly, he is naturally a skeptic of Putin and his works.

So, we are now in the bizarre place where the Trump administration seems to have two sets of policies about Russia. There is the policy of the administration, which has taken a fairly hard line on Russia, for instance, expelling 60 Russian diplomats in March after Russia’s attempt to assassinate a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom with a nerve agent.

Then there is the policy of the President, who continues to embrace Putin and to deny the assessments of his own intelligence agencies. How long is this really sustainable for the members of Trump’s war Cabinet? Or put another way, at what point should it no longer be tolerable?