Transcripts For CSPAN2 Capital News Today 20101120

you know, and when i listen to him, on the since a highly manipulative propagandist, and i know this is an unfair question that since you know a lot about these folks it seems to me those running the show, no matter what our power players and manipulating people, using a grievance being occupation or any other set of grievances to compel their followers to do things, but i think these people would try to find other mechanisms if the occupation when to grievance and so i guess the unfair question i would ask is if the occupation wasn't there what do you suspect a al-zawahiri, bin laden, the character would attempt to do is because i don't think they are going to sit -- disappeared. >> i don't think they are going to disappear but they are going to get awfully lonely. i'm not trying to tell you that bin laden and his heart of hearts wouldn't use an excuse. i think he probably was. i think the most callous politicians need followers. the problem is the fall worse more than the leader, and what we've been doing by putting in the ground forces is we have been actually giving bin laden his best meal ticket because that is the thing that recruits for him better than anything else. there might be a teeny tiny other issues that he could use as wedge issues much smaller, but man, when we give them the best mobilization to recruit we just open the doors. >> of open the floor. we've only got a few minutes because kori schake and seth are in the doors. what had the chief of naval operations here and he's into the offshore balancing. where is the air force and have you talked to the army, i mean just a quick profile on how you think the navy and the army are responding. >> i think what is happening here is in terms of officials or even semi-official responses, what we are seeing over the last year, actually just the last year is the beginning of serious consideration and side of the pentagon, inside key institutions in washington. i think that it's because in the last few years this argument has become so much more robust. it's not other brought pieces of this available in my work for instance earlier. it is look at the robust information we have to read it's a lot like smoking and lung cancer. so when you are seeing is bit by bit by bit people engaged in the spirit >> serious people the army and air force? >> and i think the army would have a tremendous interest in developing a rapidly deployable army much like we did the rdf concept in the 80's which allowed us to rapidly deploy all those divisions to kick saddam hussein out of kuwait. that didn't just happen. there was a tremendous amount of thought that went into the development and the army were very much behind it, and i think that it's really possible to build a robust coalition behind offshore balancing. >> let me open this one. is it press got to the tuesday six prescott? >> good morning, sir. thank you for open sourcing the data. it's very unique in its kind. i am a marine officer, first lieutenant quantico and i think there might be a good partnership with you and the center for advanced cultural learning i believe this down there. marine officers are expected to be not only leaders but teachers, see you -- this is useful in teaching our troops. where do you see this to go with me be adding vocational data? >> in terms of the specific location data we have gis, using a little jargon, sorry, so we actually have multiple levels of location, four levels of granularity and some of the folks who were quite expert in that if you want to know about that we can definitely talk to you even today so what we are putting on the web we are going to put more on the web as time goes on but let me speak to the public education point because it is one thing to come to washington but one thing said is they are imprisoned by the environment and so it's really important that many people see the information. why is that? it's like smoking and lung cancer. in the 1940's there were questions as smoking really cause lung cancer? there were interests trying to prevent them from getting out. what happened is the public came to understand smoking causes lung cancer duraid that's why we have better policies. >> i bulges but we need to get to other voices and moved to the panel. this one right here. this makes it the last one because i want to bring kori schake and seth. >> cheese and from the navy staff. has your research will tell power project it from off shore jones and otherwise not occupation force would be responded to bye suicide bombers? are we to believe terrorism would be reduced the power projection was sustained from offshore? >> i don't think the research supports joan attacks in lieu of the boots. if we look out to the future of offshore and say what we want to do is have thousands of drones killing instead of thousands of books on the ground i don't think we are to be very happy. it will be called a real lucky patient. i don't mean offshore balancing to be that, mass drone at tuck. there would still be of the offshore balancing strategy. as laid out very clearly he's interested in using political tools to develop a policy on short but there will be times when the force is going to be needed, and those times its best with air power and naval power or in extreme rapidly deployable ground forces this assessment of your work that i've read about in the blogosphere is that you are read as some sort of a pacifist that pulled the military out and anyone that listened to the snows that is not the case that you're talking about alternative ways of securing the foreign policy national-security objectives etc. without undermining. thank you, very much, bob for the presentation. thank you. [applause] let me invite [inaudible] 3-cd really cool people to it i was making a joke not to the leedy and read this is the lady in red. now we are going to talk about reviewing and reconsidering the u.s. strategy in the middle east, and we have three excellent folks joint. koriflynt leverett is in the new american strategy program and directs the new america foundation geopolitics he and his wife publishing an extremely provocative and well read blog called the race for iran. he served as senior director for middle east national security council, middle east expert as the secretary of state policy planning staff and was also a senior analyst at the intelligence agency and it is a pleasure to have him here. we have said jones at pfizer and officer for the commanding general of the u.s. special operations command policy, special operations and combating terrorism. seth received a ph.d. from the ever see a chicagos i want to mention since they are the co-sponsors today and very happy to have him. he's also the author of the in the graveyard is employers americas war in afghanistan, and served as a political science at the rand corporation. and kori schake is a great thinker and we've debated and wrestled over issues for years he's a taha researcher at the u.s. military academy at west point. kori schake served as the senior policy advisor for national security for the mccain palin campaign, worked in the bush white house national security council staff responsible for policy development for senator john mccain. so i want -- and presidents candidates on the can. so what to think all of you for being here. i'm going to ask kori schake to take the helm first and shared her thoughts on this objective then move to seth. >> thank you, my friend. i am pleased to be with you. i think this is an important subject, and i am a big fan of the research that professor pape has done. i have to say at the apollo sea prescriptions year he draws from them are inadequate to the political purposes of which we are using force. that is i think that by saying that the majority of attacks that occur in places where american forces are deployed is simply to acknowledge what willie sutton said when he said he brought banks because that is where the money is. that is, we put military forces for political purposes to protect ourselves and our interests and our allies to shape the world and we speaker beneficial to our interest to present groups like al qaeda and the taliban to contest their to their control of people in that is what draws the attacks. so if you're willing to cede the political purposes, fair enough to say that this isn't worth doing. or to say that i would like to do it differently. but i don't think it is by definition true that the simple presence of troops as opposed to the political purposes that we put them there for it is what is dreading the attacks. second point i would make is that it does seem to be nontrivial that we are not talking about all stationing american troops everywhere in the world. we are talking about the stationing of american troops in iraq and afghanistan and places where we are contesting the site over corn the use of terrorism against civilian populations or our own. so the u.s. troops in germany are not of driving attacks by germans on the united states or american troops. the same is true in south korea and lots of other places where american forces were deployed to protect our interests, our allies and prevent bad things from happening. so if the first point is that it is the political purposes that we are contesting not the simple presence of troops driving the violent activity that we are engaged in. the second point is not all stationing is the same. the third point i would make is the strategy of shot short balancing is the extended deterrence that we in the europeans' debated for the better part. for those of you who don't study transatlantic politics, the nature of the debate is that threatened countries wanted american soldiers there because that was the most binding guarantee the united states would engage in the fight when the fight came, and for about 55 years or so, germans run their hands about whether the united states would be committed to the defense of germany if there were not u.s. troops there. it is what is gruesomely called the buckets of blood strategy. nei moly if we are not doherty alongside, how can you ever be genuinely confident that the united states will publicly commit and see through the commitment? it seems to me a strategy that was cause for concern about linkage between allies as close as the united states, france, germany and britain that the question and nobody is our political willingness to say what we are going to do would be much higher in countries where we have a lot less in common and are a lot less engaged so you have the extended deterrence question that i think i at least have not seen the advocates of offshore balancing address how we are going to handle the problem. the fourth concern i have is an offshore balancing strategy it seems to me is inherently retaliatory meaning it is impossible to shape in the long term to engage people to as opposed to react after something has happened. and it seems to me for the kinds of war we are fighting that are wars about the political shape of societies, the role of religion in society, about whether people feel safe enough to do what is in our interest and their interest to do. that unless you are engaged in contesting and shaping the political space it seems you're always going to be retaliating, and i think about bob pape's closing comments about the drone, the retaliatory strategies are strategies that are publicly removed from the problems people are contesting in their societies. if all we are is reaching in and dropping bombs, the likelihood people are going to consider our interest there interest are going to carry at all about problems we are worried about or are going to give the kind of information that are going to make us successful are much lower. so in conclusion, i would say that parallel to me is not smoking in public education, lung cancer. the parallel to me is if we are not sailing ships at sea dotmac we want to be involved in maritime solutions and we also want be involved in commerce and securing the sea lines of communication, freedom of navigation of the sea and protecting and dancing american interest in the world. offshore balancing is a strategy that removes us from engagement and that political and economic means can create the same effect the use in the military forces. i wish that was true. i am a big earnest good government type. i think the whole of government operations are terrific. i wish my government was capable of it. i see my friend, ambassador pickering, sitting over there. there's nobody that his more ardently advocated building the kind of diplomatic and economic tools we need. if he thinks we have them and can step into it greater role in this i would be delighted to be wrong. i don't see a were government acting. >> thank you very much. seth jones. >> thank you very much. it's an honor to be here. what i would like to do is decide my comments into three segments. the first is looking very briefly at some preliminary data i've put together on how and why terrorist groups end. before i went into the government. second, i would like to focus a little bit on the afghan pakistan theater and to take bob and some other strategy is and look specifically at the case of afghanistan, and then provide some concluding remarks. i served the last nine or ten years just before and up to the u.s. invasion in afghanistan at some capacity. so i have spent a lot of time there's a this is why i'm going to focus my comments -- but i will get some of the cases there. but i want to start off with this question we focus a lot on what causes individuals to use strategies whether it's suicide terrorism or whether it's more conventional strategies. ironically the largest instruments being used against u.s. forces now oy and allied forces and afghan are not suicide attacks today. they are more conventional in protest explosive devices or small arms fire or are pg against u.s. helicopters, not a suicide attacks and they are not killing the largest numbers of americans at least according to the u.s. government data. but when looking the wet when and why group seven did historical, again, this is the indictment together -- data i together. but i find interesting is looking at 648 cases since 1968, of how groups ended what is striking is that current tour the bulk of groups ended for one of two reasons, either there was a political settlement or negotiated settlement reached with a terrorist or insurgent group were number two, the primary focus was on but i will call police and intelligence agencies, covert clandestine agencies against a terrorist group. the percentage of cases where terrorist groups actually achieved victory was fairly small. and the percentage of the cases where military forces, mostly conventional military forces defeated the group on the battlefield was small with one important caveat where we have large insurgent groups that were built in white and an army in cambodia for example is the primary cases where one could take on military groups or terrorist groups to over large footprints on the ground. now, there obviously are some out lawyers there but the bulk of the data is again suggested settlements or really covert clandestine operations. again with the exception of large insurgent groups. what's interesting i think with some of the data back with the afghanistan case blog sketched out the approach in afghanistan that started out with a small footprint and then moved increasingly to a conventional operation beginning in sort of the 2003 period and moving of to large numbers of american forces right now. i think one question to ask the last ten years is what policy instrument strategies have been most successful in afghanistan, and i would look at -- i would suggest looking at two cases. one is i would look into the early period, the 9/11 period what through early 2002. and in that case the primary focus of the strategy was u.s. mostly special forces and the clandestine units on the ground. with the assistance clearly of air power and eventually some conventional units, but the focus again as we recall that period was leveraging local entities rather it was hamid karzai in the south or in kandahar, or it was using a other force operating in newark. the second is a question about where we see most of the success on the ground on today. where we see a raise for the taliban have lost ground based on their control or influence territory last year or two years ago. i would say you are seeing two kinds of cases or to kind of eerie as. one is some areas of helmand where the u.s. marine forces have been operating in putting districts like [inaudible] and the others are in kandahar, and so the question is in these cases -- because it and we are seeing increasing television penetration in the north -- but in these cases where we see the taliban had losses, again, looking at a variation of cases, what has been the reason. i think the explanation at least my explanation sitting inside the government is the strategy used was essentially leveraging the local entities whether it was under pashtu in groups and helmand. this has been a marine force approach and in the case of special operations forces leveraging local entities. these are mostly the same thing i could lay this out in the province of the eastern afghanistan and other areas. stepping back for a moment it suggests in some ways it dovetails with bob's comments earlier with which i'm quite familiar with if i think what we see again is areas where the bulk of the effort against taliban or other insurgent groups, ahead is a function of local elements pushing back. these are individuals who have a much better knowledge of the ground, a a much better knowledge of the structures in areas, and the role of the u.s. government especially the military is to facilitate, to facilitate providing information, providing backup in some cases direct option but the bulk of the effort is locals fighting for their communities. and so what we have seen really the last several months is the beginning of what i would call major shifting in u.s. policy in afghanistan towards leveraging local institutions, communities in the east, the west, the south and parts of the north, clearly part of general petraeus's strategy and it does go i think to a large american footprint is what locals see as a fight between insurgent or terrorist groups and outside forces. this is the way the fight is often portrayed rather than leveraging local entities. it make concluding remarks of them on this particular area because i would still are doing what we are seeing on the intelligence side is the headquarters structure for al qaeda that largely exists in the pakistan afghanistan frontier arguing that this is in pakistan of afghanistan is sort of a silly argument for anyone that's been along the border area because it is the poorest border and we have seen movements based on opportunities across both sides of the border but i would point out several of the more serious threats whether it was faisal to target new york city or the most recent streams we've seen in mumbai style attacks in europe all have gone back to the core based in the afghan pakistan frontier so this area is important still, and i think we've got to think very carefully about how we approach it, so first just to conclude, i think the data suggests akaka terrorist risks creating a a more clandestine covert effort against terrorist groups if one can't cut a deal with them and i think in the case of al qaeda the objectives are so large that cutting a deal could -- you wouldn't want to any way, but it isn't possible. second, the u.s. so long looked at this case from a top-down perspective to build the central government institutions. this is fundamentally in my view the long way of misunderstanding of politics and power in afghanistan. and then finally, again, i think this area continues to be critical. so part of these arguments i think dovetail with bob's argument, though their needs to be as a part of the strategy i think we are seeing in a range of places a presence, permanent presence to facilitate on the ground i just brought a chair of and i just got back today and a half ago from china and realize this is wrong, i should be sitting in the should be standing. [laughter] i apologize to sell off and kori, but i am sitting. >> thank you very much. since the bob pape published his first book on this side terrorism in 2005i thought his analysis of the root cause of suicide terrorism is one of the handful of genuinely important pieces of social science scholarship to appear since the end of the cold war. and i also think the policy implementation he drawls in his analysis, the imperative for the united states return to this over the horizon military posture in the middle east and the persian gulf is also profoundly important. the new book that bob and james feldman have published a think extends that analysis and that policy argument in some very, very powerful and timely way is. what i want to argue over the next few minutes is the kind of recasting or we calibration of america's military posture in this part of the world. in my view, it is an indispensable staff, but it is only one step in what i think needs to be much bigger reset in america's overall strategic posture in this part of the world. to pick up on kori schake's point about offshore balancing basically surrendered and the political purposes for which we deploy military power i think she put her finger on something very important. what are the political purposes for which we deploy or should deploy military force in this part of the world. if the purpose of deeply and military power in the middle east by the united states are recently to try to maintain what is ultimately an unsustainable quest for regional hegemony in which we are out to remake middle eastern society around long as we fight ideologically more comfortable. i do not think that is a political purpose which is worthy of american blood and treasure. i also think it is a political purpose which will almost by definition drive us to use military force in ways that are counter productive and theater and over the long-term strategically disastrous for america's international position. the proper political purpose of deploying military force in the least in the persian gulf i would add met is to engage in a prudent management of the balance of power in the region in ways that really will serve american interest. understanding in assessing the balance of pow measures of military aspects and power projection capabilities can capture. today the united states has utterly unique capabilities to protect large amounts of conventional military power into this part of the world and we are going to continue to have those unique capabilities for as far as the eye can see. the weather is capable of doing that in the least. but just by other measures of political and economic influence the united states today to put it frankly is a declining power in the middle east is less capable of achieving its policy objectives in this part of the world and that was the case ten years ago with its in afghanistan, whether it's in the arab-israeli arena, whether it is vis-a-vis republic of iran or regards to other regional challenges and has catalyzed an ongoing decline in america's strategic standing in this critical part of the world. in this regard, i think the observation made by former deputy secretary richard armitage after he left government, his observation was that there's certainly nothing new about regional governments, regional players, societal actors in the middle east not liking various aspects of the substance of american policy in that part of the world. but now for the first time more and more constituencies that matter in the region are questioning our competence to achieve the objectives we set for ourselves in this part of the world and that is a very important and disturbing development. as direct as regional effectiveness has declined, others have taken advantage of the same strategic development and u.s. policy mistakes that are undermining the american position in the region to boost their own position. american policy makers analysts typically light of divide between moderate, people who are interested in stability and radicals, who is presumed guiding light is instability in the region. but it would be just as accurate in terms of the way many constituencies in the region talk about these things to divide the region between those actors willing to accept and even legitimate in some ways the aspirations of the united states and or israel for various types of regional hegemony verses those actors and players who are not prepared to accept that or legitimate and even define their own political agenda in terms of resisting those hegemonic aspirations. and to put it bluntly over the last decade if you look at the relative balance of power took to in the region did in those in the region prepared to accept, work with, even legitimate american and or is really hegemony in the region, the balance of power over the last decade has shifted in relative terms to words and in favor of the resistance camps. and this has very little to do with military power. look in the arab israeli every know what has happened. in lebanon over the past decade, hezbollah has emerged not just as an increasingly capable military force which it is, but it has emerged as the single most disciplined, effective and genuinely popular political party in of lebanese politics. the conventional view in washington that in last year's parliamentary elections in lebanon the march 14th movement that has baala ignores an unpleasant reality. if you actually look at the number of votes cast in that election, march 8th, the hezbollah coalition won roughly 55% of the votes cast. they won at least a couple hundred thousand more votes than the coalition, but because under the rubric of the lebanese democracy, the speech shia votes don't count as much, the coalition ended up with more seats in parliament. but hariri still has to have a unity government with hezbollah if he is going to have any chance of staying in office. hezbollah has become an absolutely interpol and extremely important place in lebanese politics. the same could be set in broad terms about hamas and palestine. nobody raises any questions about the legitimacy of that election that hamas won. it was internationally observed. hamas won because it represents constituencies that cannot be ignored and have legitimate grievances for which hamas speaks. we have still the lovely delusion that by getting to negotiate with israel we might actually achieve a two-stage solution to the israel palestine conflict. good night. you are not going to be able to resolve the arab-israeli conflict without hamas being centrally involved on the palestinian side. you are not wish to be able to resolve the arab-israeli conflict in a way that is deliberately designed to, quote on quote, marginalize iran in the region. kuran's allies are going to be front and center in any genuine settlement to this conflict. as i said, i think shift back to offshore balancing has to be what else needs to be there? okay. i will to got three things and then i will stop. one, this point, as any surprise to anyone who has followed the work i've done over the last few years mostly with my wife and frequent coauthor about iran. i think it is indispensable to the united states realigns its relations with the united public of iran as fundamentally and comprehensively at realigned relations with the people of china in the early 1970's. i won't belabor this right now we can talk about it in the q&a if you like the bible underscore at this point the a united states cannot achieve any of its own stated priority policy objectives in arab-israeli peacemaking in afghanistan, in iraq, elsewhere. we can't do it absent a more positive and productive strategic relationship with the islamic republic. second, the united states needs to pursue a genuinely regional strategy for conflict sterilization and afghanistan. this means more than just a professed willingness to talk with iran and others about afghanistan based on what is frankly a simple-minded proposition that because the pyrenean cooperative with us in afghanistan after 9/11 they would unreflective lee do so again. i see this proposition is simple-minded because it overlooks an important reality. the armenians think the u.s. strategy in afghanistan shifted away from the strategies pursued and coordination with them during 2001 to 2003. the u.s. strategy does emerge in afghanistan is interpreted by the iranians as either incoherent or to the extent it has coherence and is aimed deliberately at important iranian interest. more specifically the iranians think the obama's engagement with the taliban is dangerous nonsense. as one senior iranian official put it to me, if the united states wants to strike a deal with the tell them why did it invade afghanistan in the first place? we have to have a genuinely regional strategy in which guests come at this point we probably are going to have to engage the taliban in no small part because of some colossal strategic blunders we made in afghanistan in 2001, 2003. but we are going to need the armenians and others at the table and their allies to create a power-sharing arrangement in afghanistan that might allow that situation to move on in a manageable way. there, the united states needs a completely new approach to the arab-israeli peacemaking. we don't have the right actors at the table. we don't have a genuinely kansas approach. we are trying to use the arab-israeli peacemaking to deal with too many other regional challenges and we are not dealing with the fundamental issues at stake in this conflict. we are going to have to pursue a genuinely comprehensive approach to the arab-israeli peacemaking in which we still play in the tracks of one another in which we stop trying to play arab-israeli diplomacy off against iran and we are willing to deal with all relevant actors. in conclusion to circle back where i started, please read and even memorized the new book from bob and james heldman. as you memorize it, if you are a policymaker please act on it. if you are like me, an ordinary citizen, i would encourage you to focus whatever level of effort you make in political activism on petitioning your government to implement recommendations. he would be doing a service to your country and that is certainly weblog has done in this new book. thanks for your attention to the [applause] >> these are three outstanding presentations coming to different portals of the question and when i look at the question strategy in the middle east i realize how inadequate it is to what we just got because when you look at is very much and are of concern and instead of the really from north africa to the persian gulf, the middle east and of course south asia which we talked about 3i want to open the floor. we are going to have lunch shortly. most of you know i never give people breaks. we like to feed people of their seats which we are not allowed to do in this room, sort of a congressional bomb shelter if you will. the former 9/11 commissioner will be your but as we get ready, think about questions. i do want to pose at least one question that brings us back into the question of a afghanistan and also iran. when i go around the world i think that if a trip flynt is right. that capacity isn't convincing other nations we have the same capacity or promise as china does and one of the drugs and think on american power on the perception of american power in my view is what we have seen in nine years in afghanistan but we are not achieving results and kori, you wrote an interesting comment bruce might tell to meet -- rydell on afghanistan and pakistan in the washington post. you had a significant doubt about the strategic course we were going into the big upsurge in the number of troops. fact you were a skeptic and brian was a skeptic. bruce and john were the advocates of the time and said, don't know if you're in the mix as well. my question is do you agree with the positions you had them, kori, has gone the way you thought, and seth, in this broad question because you brought granularity to linda understanding to what is going well or poorly is not to say that it's in the weeds because you're looking at performance on the ground but what are the broad strategic consequences of the time and effort and resources in afghanistan to the special command to look at in that region? is afghanistan looked at as it is leveraging the power in the region or is it any drag on the perception of america's ability? just click comments and the time to go to the floor. kori? >> my concern -- >> is it on? >> sorry, operator error. my concern about the president's strategy in afghanistan was and what it's worth doing. i believe it is worth doing. it's important to our interest. we have a moral responsibility given what we've started in afghanistan and i think the second order effects of not seeing it through the conclusion would be extraordinarily damaging to the country. my concern about the president's afghanistan review and the policy that came out of it is that i agree with the objectives he has set and the importance he accords to them. i don't think the resources he is willing to commit to it match up to what he is trying to achieve, and principally in that regard, i think it's time. it has been extraordinarily damaging to our interest broadly and to the war effort more narrowly that the administration sent the eight month time line. it is a function i think they made a strategic choice as a function of personal appointment with general petraeus and general maddox the administration relaxed the 18 month contract on time and that is a good thing. the second concern i have about the president's strategy in afghanistan is our exit strategy if you will is that we will draw down when afghanistan has the capacity to do the things we are doing now. and i have grave doubts about the matchup between the time line the president was imposing and afghan capacity to get there at the speed that we believe. i think i am not alone in having grave doubts about whether the karzai administration shares our object is to such an extent that we can be successful without a greater effort on their part. i myself struggle when a lot of times thinking about whether there are more cost-effective strategies for achieving what we want, and i go back and forth on this to be honest that it does seem to me that a slower commitment of resources over a long curve period of time might match up more closely with the capacity the afghans to take over the mission but i am quite sympathetic to the fundamental strategic argument of the surge which is you got to change the security dynamic to change the political dynamic in only once you have done that are people going to look a problem in a different way. >> thanks, kori. seth? >> sure i will step back and address the more strategic issue right now that you asked. i think part of the question as you look strategically across the middle east and south asia is for either balance of power or balance of threat russia now. when the united states decides to deploy the military instrument or military instruments in addition to others, but are the best options available? and i would say what at least what i believe we have learned over the past decade since line 11 is that the use of large-scale conventional forces, that is a large footprint is appropriate when you're dealing with a conventional military, as to whether it would be a tie one scenario when one is talking about naval forces, whether it was targeting the iraqi regime, whether or not to think it is a good idea, the use of conventional forces tends to be inappropriate. but when you are dealing with terrorist groups, insurgent groups for the most part, and what we've learned is in general the iraq experience supports this, the u.s. experience now in afghanistan now supports this is a large presence of american forces in the ground to try to, quote, when for locals tends not to be the best use of american military power, rather, the use of what i would call for covert or clandestine efforts to leverage legitimate local actors tends to be more appropriate use of the military instrument when talking about a terrorist insurgent group and where the issue becomes complex is when you're dealing with countries like afghanistan with a very weak central government, weak national security forces and a long history in pashtu and areas of local policing tradition, so to try to ramrod this through the central government in all cases i think is a very western concept in that area. supporters it is the strategic level i think we've learned a lot of lessons on the military instrument, what has worked and what hasn't and when we are dealing with terrorist groups for the most part we are looking at the clandestine cia or special operations entities as the primary instrument overseas. >> seth. thank you. flynt? >> the conversation we are having about afghanistan right now is reflective of the conversation we have about the afghanistan as a country right now is utterly devoid of either for of the when a defined political goal or serious discussion of the dynamic of afghan politics. what is the goal? what is the point we want to reach in terms of a political state in afghanistan where we would feel like okay, we have achieved our objective and we can move on and how to get to the political stage. you know, i think for a lot of the reasons seth just described i don't think there is a security solution to this. i don't care if we went 18 months or five years, there's not a security solution to this. there is a political solution at least in theory that is based on power-sharing among all of the relevant ethnic constituencies in afghanistan, and at this point as i said because of mistakes we made early on in afghanistan, the taliban is going to have to be part of that mix, but we are also going to have to have a lot of other players in the next. you know, iranians and others look at karzai as a settlement for the taliban and they see that as very, very bad for their interest that in powers the pakistani patrons pocket, put pressure on afghanistan and the neighbor and is a bad outcome if we let that kind of thing if down the road what we are going to get is a resumption of real civil war in afghanistan. the way to stop that and the way to let us get out is a power-sharing arrangement but that's quite a genuinely regional strategy. we are going to need the iranians helping us will get other players helping us with this, and we are not even talking about that in a serious way. and frankly i think that means more american soldiers are going to die in afghanistan, more money is going to get wasted their or i'm not really sure what purpose. >> we need to get to guice head and back in this room so i'm going to cluster a few questions. this gentleman right here for to run a microphone to you quickly and if he would ask one of the three questions you will make me really happy. well, my name is dan caldwell professor of science at pepperdine university, and i would be interested, dr. jones, if you comment on whether there is an analogous group in afghanistan to the sons of iraq that professor pape commented on in terms of your emphasis on leveraging local groups. >> and this gentleman behind? >> thank you. executives intelligence review. none of you have mentioned the marcos side of narcoterrorism and yet i'm sure as you know the russians have especially gone off their drug czar declared them to the second opium war with the massive flow of drugs out of the british controlled area of the afghanistan until recently. >> i want you to move to the question. specter quickly. the problem is the u.s. at fenestration under obama has basically said we shouldn't take on the drug issue, we want to focus on terrorism. general jones, just two days before he was fired or resigned a powerful speech in russia fully endorsing the russian call for the global collaborative effort on fighting drugs, fighting international crime and the sophisticated measure face with international business so it a very much like to hear your comment on that. >> thank you. right down here. >> this is for seth jones. what operation would you characterize as having been the most successful in the name that he would like to see happen in afghanistan? >> thank you. and in this gentleman in the middle and i will come back -- >> the jamestown foundation. i'm wondering if -- this is for anybody -- as far as creating democracy in iraq and afghanistan, i've worked with dr. abdullah on the presidential campaign trail last year and he felt he had to play a mixed pashtu and identity to depending on where he was going, where he was traveling, ethnically in afghanistan. in iraq there is a sense that we need to have someone from the majority population, i.e. shia commesso with the ethnic divisions we are actually creating more lebanese democracies than actual genuine democracy. in other words, no one would say that a christian could rule iraq or that and lose the court rule afghanistan, and this is if anyone wants to comment that's really the way to go as far as what local people think it's not a western-style democracy. >> great. it's got to hold the rest of the questions without getting a hook back here. getting one jim what we will have an opportunity to talk but i will turn to kori and seth and flynt for responses. >> i agree that we are missing a huge opportunities for cooperation not just with russia but iran, china, other countries who are concerned about narcotics and drugs in and out of afghanistan. it does seem to me some place we could really make cooperative profit together soon. on the question of are we creating a real democracy. i don't think i view the iraq example the same way that you do. that is it does seem to me that one of the costs of iraq is paying for the diminished interest by the united states and the accelerated drawdown of the forces on lack of interest the obama administration has taken in iraq is a very powerful trend which is post secretary and political organization that we saw in iraq over the course if of the year before the election. it's much more brittle now. yet sunni support although he isn't sunni lots of candidates of the opportunity, even the british candidates moving beyond secretary in polls of voters i think was an extraordinarily positive find that the water is receding now. .. horrible range of reasons, including target and assassination. i think what is consistent in pashtun areas of the country, not entirely even pashtun areas, politics remain very local, so the power brokers, the tribal leaders tend to be very localized. and what you see in a rage of areas with fewer sides in the western out the guys in the south, judges and the chinese in the east is a fair amount of deep-seated unhappiness with kalat and her other insurgent groups. so a blood oath resistance on potential. on the examples of what one would use from over here. i would say one of the most interesting examples is if you go back about a year and a half ago, argun.just out of sight of kandahar city was heavily penetrated by the taliban after the death of molar teeth come out his thiessen fractured. you've had 180-degree turn, talking the largely been kicked out of most of the district and it's been for a whole range of reasons. one of them is the output sizes up against taliban area. the locally generated effort. we support from the afghan government in which isaf forces, but using a very small footprint, but a very lethal one. thanks. >> thank you, seth. i want to thank everyone here. i'm really getting the hook. we have the privilege of governor thomas kean, chairman -- cochairman of the 9/11 commission joining us right after what i consider a blackberry break. go check her blood. , grab a sandwich. don't get too situated. come back and join us at 12:30. please welcome and thank that lever, kori shockey and seth jones. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> we will continue with the rest of the conference on counterterrorism strategy after a short break. >> today, the senate passed the $4.6 billion bill to settle claims by american indians that the federal government mismanaged the trust funds. >> now, the rest of the capitol hill conference on counterterrorism strategy. this session begins at 9/11 commission chairman, tom kane. this is for enough hours. >> a brilliant next speaker. there really is no one more better position to talk about where we are with the war on terror, the need to move beyond the war on terror or not and also to help us think about this both in the objective reality and then the politics of the war on terror than our next speaker, governor thomas kean. governor thomas can serve as the chairman of the 9/11 commission which was responsible for investigating the causes of the 9/11 attacks and providing recommendations to future -- to prevent future terrorist attacks. this is the most important national security commission in u.s. history since the investigation of pearl harbor in the 1940s. a republican two-term governor of new jersey, governor kane won reelection in 1995 with the largest margin of the very in the history of new jersey gubernatorial races and left office as one of the most popular political figures in the states history. he went on to serve as the president of drew university for over 15 years. and today, governor kane is one of our country's most powerful leaders. in his remarks today are sure to help american meet the challenge of asymmetric threats going forward into the future. please join me in welcoming, governor kane. [applause] >> thank you very much for that probably too kind introduction, but i enjoyed it. the thank you very much and think the new american foundation. this is an extraordinarily important conference here today and that's going to make a big contribution. this is an enormously important issue. i was asked to talk on the topic of basically is america safer. and the simple answer since 9/11 the simple answer is yes, we are referred. but not safe enough. and i think we know that. we're still not doing all the things we should even have to do to keep us as safe as we really should be. that sort of the topic of the group that lee hamilton and i have set up here in washington for the national security preparedness group of sort of a successor to the 9/11 commission, how was the bipartisan policy center here. and our mission is to things. one is continue to look at the recommendations of the 9/11 commission and see how many and how thoroughly they implement it. and secondly is to see how the threat is changed. it's an almost 10 years now and the threat is not the same. and whether it's resistant, whether of vice policy makers are responding to the new threat. in this capacity, lee and i are often asked how has it changed? in either recommendations been implemented? and so what we did when we formed the group first was meet with numerous officials when almost everybody involved was particularly questioned and master of the terrorist experts in our group, professor bruce hoffman at georgetown university and peter bergen of the new american foundation to help us answer the question. now i know peter is coming later. peter bergen is on your program for today's event and i want to particularly recognizes expertise on the subject. he's been enormously helpful to us. let me summarize a bit some of the things we found. first we started from the assumption that it's been six long years since we've made our report on 9/11 commission. and therefore it was appropriate to to do a new look and a new assessment. i think it's also significant that it's been three long years as well since the last publicly disseminated u.s. government threat assessment. and this is the national intelligence estimate produced by the national intelligence council back in july of 2007. so we talked with her group. we thought that enormously important to begin the rest of our work of making recommendations to establish the foundation and the foundation was to decide, what is the threat today and how does it differ. how serious this? how is it evolved and changed since our report. and even since the national intelligence assessment of three years ago. before i talk about that, let me say that we believe very strongly that although the world has changed, that most of the recommendations which we made are as important today as they were what made them almost six years ago. now go but just three of them briefly as they are in order. one is we found almost our number one recommendation. we found that the problem was before 9/11 but also 17 or 18 intelligence agencies simply weren't talking to each other enough. and because there is a culture of secrecy within the agency, you don't work for those agencies must you can keep secret, but their product. and i kept secrets as we know it even from one another. for instance, we know or we suspect that if the fbi and the cia had actually been talking to each other at that point in sharing information each of them hunt about some of the 9/11 conspirators who returned in the united states plotting, that is a very, very possible by the sharing of information but that plot might have been disrupted. so, information sharing. and we decided to implement that by making sure there was somebody at the top of the system, so there is a direct of national intelligence responsible if necessary for banging heads together, to make sure that information sharing is taking place. i will tell you in my view today, although information sharing is much much better, it's not where it should be. and we found that out with christmas day plot. there was still among agencies, information each of them how they didn't share with each other and perhaps if they had began, but so it would not have been allowed to get on that playing. also, the director of national intelligence. the legislation that we recommend was that we set up a very strong director of national intelligence because it had to be strong in order to get these agencies to work together. the legislation as is so often happened was changed in congress and it was weakened. and that is a concern because they now have been some problems with the structure of the director of national intelligence such as suspicion as to whether or not he has the powers to control and to regulate the various areas of intelligence in the united states government. that's a continuing problem in that group is called as a number of congressional committees for the president of the united states to make sure that he gets the dni full authority to the job which we think he has to have in order to make sure information is shared properly among these various agencies. there's actually one more recommendation and then i'll go on to the future. almost all of our recommendations were implemented by congress to some degree, except one. and that was the recommendation above and the united states congress that fell. maybe that's not surprising. and actually the members of the commission who had served the united states congress that that was the most difficult recommendation, but it's very important also and it has not yet been implemented. intelligence, remember to secret by its very nature. we could listen, you and i took the recommendations going on before the transportation committee, the environmental committees, tax writing committees. we can't go listen to the intelligence committee because what they're hearing a secret. so the press and the public does not get involved as they do in other areas in debate. now what that means is that the congress has a peculiar responsibility in this area. because if they don't oversee the intelligence establishment properly comment nobody does. there's no other group set up to do it. the intelligence committees of the congress have to do it and how to do it well. and yet at the time of the 9/11 and afterwards, members of the committee have told me personally and recently as last year they use the same word. our oversight is dysfunctional. the homeland security department reports now to over 90 different congressional committees. and that means the directors of that department, those cabinet secretaries spend a lot of their time testifying over preparing testimony for the committees rather than doing their job. that's not proper oversight. leadership has got to do something about that. secondly, intelligence committees themselves have no budget oversight whatsoever. now, many of you know this town very well. and you know the congress. so you also understand what the agencies respond to and who controls the dollars. if you control the dollars come you don't get a lot of attention from the various agencies of government. if you do, you get a lot of intelligent. they don't control the dollars. so the result is often the intelligence committees cannot get the information they really need in order to do proper oversight. and that hasn't changed. so we still believe strongly in our recommendation these got to give proper oversight to homeland security by less committees and you got to give the intelligence committee some sort of budget oversight to pay attention to them so they can get a proper job of oversight. they're not doing it now and they'll tell you they're not. now let me tell you about the future. we believe that the threat at this time as both diversified and become much more complex than it has been in any time since the actual attacks on 9/11. as concern to me that there is no single profile of the terrorist threat in the united states today. we see as an adversary that in essence is drawn off the there's of all societies and every singles work of life. these persons born in afghanistan, egypt, pakistan and somalia, president said the united states. in many cases, naturalized american citizens. but also in the past few years we see increasingly, for the first time, american citizens themselves, that is people born in the united states gravitating or been summoned to the clarion call of terrorism. or you might say jihads and they're getting it over the internet. we discovered that the perpetrators of the people applauding in a terrorist act in this country who will travel overseas to receive training in terrorist camps, the people who were young and people who are old, male and female, married, unmarried, had children, didn't have children. very well educated. some of them like see how she died. others were high school dropouts or even jail birds or ex-cons. we encountered people who would self describe as petite, blue-eyed blondes and would easily blend in and close quote. and i was of course colima rose we called g.i. jane described yourself. that's as well as chicago and david hadley was her common sense as you remember was responsible for a lot of the success of the november 2008 mumbai attacks staged by a very close ally of al qaeda. he was either a continuing after that to carry out reconnaissance using the united states as a base for the future terrorist attacks of al qaeda or other pakistani groups. we also found out that the leadership of these terrorist movements that threaten the united states is becoming increasingly americanized. what do i mean by that? key operatives to someone like sheikh osama at al qaeda central. or whether it's someone like and work out how we and the arabian influence for someone like omar hammami, al shabab or smalley ally of al qaeda. what we see in all these cases are americans. people without passports, people who were born here. people who are citizens of our country, going abroad, getting some training, making common cause with terrorist troops. and that is something that has to be for us fundamentally new and fundamentally disquieting. finally we concluded that the attacks and plots of the past year or so i'm not one off. and i isolated things. we should look at one by one and say that was unusual. or we believe they are part of a broader strategy, embraced by our adversaries by al qaeda, its affiliates and their associates to try and take him to flutter and massive with local threats and threats coming from all sorts of directions and all different atmospheres. we found that it is also worrisome that the united states has failed to adequately understand and prepare for the threats. from the prevailing conviction of those who talk to admit existed long lasted shelflife and couldn't ever have been. but the communities were not communities as foreign terrorists. we thought we were much better educated, particularly europe for the united kingdom. and somehow that the american melting pot would establish sort of a firewall can prevent radicalization in recruitment in this country. get, this has not proven to be the case. it was the case before 9/11. everybody from the 9/11 plot came from abroad that was harmed. so all her efforts since then has been to make sure they get on planes to watch people coming from other countries that might be suspected of harboring terrorists. but this is something new. it's a new trend, an alarming trend and we better get a cover-up. this is a threat that's more complex, more diverse than september 11, 2001. now, another disturbing thing, we discovered there is no single government agency responsible for identifying radicalization and trying to stop recruitment. it may be that we need some kind of a multiagency strategy where they all get together, but that concerns me. especially because her experience of the 9/11 commission was it's everybody's responsibility and it's nobody's responsibility. moreover, we found it is not even clear which agency is among the vast array of agencies in the intelligence law enforcement of the united states, which agency showed the lead responsibility here for radicalization in recruitment. and they have told us these issues of a further study. we hope you are that, what they're looking for a cause is our achilles heel. we need a strategy to deal with this growing problem in this emerging threat. the diversity of this array of recent recruits presents new and greater challenges to the intelligence community and law enforcement agencies across this entire country. that arise many of the agencies are overstress and are inundated with information and leads and now they have to run down a new penelope of threats coming from all of her dimensions in variety that is in organizations. and some of what we found out is that threat is very different than the threat which face us on 9/11. it's changed profoundly. the day american face dynamic threat has diversified to a broad potential rate of attacks from shootings two car bombs to simultaneous suicide attacks to attempted in-flight bombings of passenger aircraft. and this is a state of affairs so different than it was at the time of 9/11. let me conclude, we said in 9/11 and i report that part of the problem was a failure of imagination on behalf of the u.s. government that didn't really get ahead of the problem. they knew about al qaeda. they knew about bin laden. think about the attacks abroad but never really imagined that they could pull off something as they did in their own country. this is something again, which requires a rethinking in the new thinking of our strategy. we're doing a lot of work on this under the leadership of bertman hoffman and the group i'm working, consulting with diverse, meeting with everybody we can in the administration regarding recommendations that this country might attack to deal with this new threat. but the one thing we cannot do is fight the last war. one thing we cannot do is continue to make is based on the threats and what happened in 9/11. we have to look at this new threat. we have to look at this in my mind as a new strategy and we have use all the resources or intelligence agencies in the united states government. and most importantly a citizenry and soul because i have often said it won't be as good as they are. it won't be the cia or the fbi for federal agencies that are probably going to discover the next five. it's going to be some sort of confidence to tell us local policeman is something strong and the local policeman has got to have the contacts and the conference to call somebody in the federal government to get people on top of it. remember, from the case of the bomb in times square, times square is probably the area of the united states with the most and least coverage. more policeman who have a yard, probably anyplace else in the united states. yet it was a straight man who found that illegally parked van with a bomb in it. so at this point, we have to call in everybody. but we have to have a strategy in a store trying to develop now with our small group. that's what i believe i hope the united states government will be trying to get on top of in the next days and months. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, governor. thank you. [applause] we will be taking questions. and so, at the moment, by the way, we only have one mic. it turns out steve must have slipped up with the mic. if folks over here just for now could start to put their hands up and then we'll be moving around. so while removing the make, sir, you presented really quite an illuminating picture of the threat today. but they also wanted to see how you reflect on your experiences been on the forefront of trying to bring change to make us safer. he described also the difficulty of change. and i just wondered if you could understand, are we facing simply bureaucratic inertia to be overcome. no one really has tried to produce as much changes you. can you help us understand the difficulties of change? >> i think change is always difficult, particularly so when washington, particularly so in a bureaucracy. it's just very, very different. was take one of her lead and wonderful agencies of this country. the fbi is truly a wonderful group of people. but they were trained by the late j. edgar hoover. and what they were trained to do was to build up surveillance of people, put up enough evidence, make sure you have enough evidence to take them to trial, convict them and send them away. and the fbi did superbly for a number of years. now were asking the fbi to do something completely different. we are asking the fbi to surveilled people, yes. but to pass on his perhaps to other agencies are things that might be wrong. to build up evidence not to necessarily put somebody in jail, but to prevent a plot which could kill a lot of their fellow citizens. if you think about that, that's a whole new thing. and to have somebody who has been trained to the other, suddenly to turn around this is very difficult. take in the same agency, the top people in the agency have always been the agent. you've heard about them, the agent who goes and arrest somebody. you know, they are heroes and at the top people of the agency, people most respected, people we all like. now, it's not for sale at the agent. the agent brings back information. that information has to be put together with a whole bunch of other information gathered from other places by the analyst. and the analyst becomes perhaps the most important people, but the analyst is not respected and is not paid as the most important. so we have trouble keeping good on these various agencies. you think of the thousands and thousands of people who collect information that analysts may be the most important person of all because they're putting together pieces of the puzzle in order to get these people in convict and. that's one example. i mentioned congress. i don't know how you change congress. i really don't. i mean, i've washed congress as u.s. for years and years are there some wonderful people in the united states congress, but they don't change. i mean, we testified -- lee emil and i testify again and again before these committees. and we said to them very openly that the way you conduct your oversight of intelligence agencies as dysfunctional as a word they use. and they're not. and they say yes it is. but then it goes up to the important people, the appropriators, people control the congress and they don't want to change. they like the fact that i'm services has control of the intelligence budget, even though they haven't got time to pay attention to it. they like the idea and then want to change that control. so nothing changes. so changes very, very hard. and the only way i know of every book come as far as i'm concerned, maybe there's one or two a day. every single candidate for congress last time around and this time around pledge themselves to the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, right-click every single one. they came back to washington having been elected to reelect it. one of the rain recommendations is about changing the congress. nothing happened. i mean, that changes very, very difficult. the only way i know to do it is to keep on working on it. after 9/11 we had tremendous man behind the commission. leah and i testified and they came back from vacation, so we had a lot of momentum going for us. now, it's a little bit more difficult. we don't want to wait for another attack. we want to change these things now, get better information hearing, get a stronger dni. get the fbi and cia to even be better at information sharing. and i could go on. but there's a lot of things we have to do. and the only way were going to get done is for people like you would like to keep pushing it. sooner or later the world gets away, but it's tough. >> and we're definitely doing that. >> thank you very much. i'm benjamin tewell, an independent analyst and former service officer retired. my question is two levels. how was it that the terrorist threat has become more developed and complex, as you say, and to what extent have our foreign policies or failures to adjust these policies contributed to this complexity in this new trend? >> that's a very good question. if you look at what the terrorists say -- i'm not saying we should change it burn policy, but i am saying it contributes. if you listen to what they say when bin laden himself spoke originally in the original thought paul, he said there were two things he mentioned. one was the support for israel and lack of the palestinians. and the other was we had troops in the soil. because at that point whitsun troops in saudi arabia. those are the two things the mentioned. and you can read these statements. and they do mention, you know, they want us out of the entire region under any american troops there. any american fair at all. but we are not going to change. i don't think we're going to change a lot of the things. we have to leave american troops to protect her insecurities and security of our friends. we can change the way we approach it. i think we have to do ourselves, semi said earlier he collected the areas of the 9/11 report was where we recommended a whole bunch of outreaches to the arab world. similar to the kinds of things we did in eastern europe before the breakup of the cold war, where he had all sorts of information agencies. red exchanges. with education programs. the oedipal bunch of things to try and show them who we were, who we really were, that the propagandist told us we were. i still think we can do a lot more of that. why is it changed? i think it's a deliberate strategy. we were very successful in stopping people who wanted to do us harm, and what passports from other parts of the world. very successful. we can see now in an agency in washington. you can go there. i happen you can see everybody's getting on every plane in the united states everywhere in the world. and the ideas discussed these people before they even get on the plane. they recognize that's been successful. for years been one and one of them a a big waste of the odd thing that will stop us if we do nuclear explosion on the soil. he wanted two of them. i was trying to do something they. well, we stopped that, made that more and more difficult. and then they saw that the smaller plots seem to disrupt us, too. so i think the new strategy is to see if we can get people who don't look like we look like part of the world, people were american citizens. and let's see if we can do some smaller attacks. let's see if that doesn't disrupt them. and so that the new strategy. and i don't believe in something that happened by accident. >> yes, sir, my name is kim a bat in iraq for the pakistani spectator. my question is that i have a friend in israel is standing like less than 5% on terrorism prevention, but they are a lot more successful than we are. so aren't we kind of other very high redrick, encouraging terrorism by getting a lot more attention than we deserve it. for example, in israel, you have these kind of nonsense things that will go on to deadlines, they don't make it to that issue. and pakistan, we are losing at least 3000 people per year. we have us on september 11th, we have lost 1000 pakistani troops. and we are spending so much of that country on this nonsense just because it has become a kind of industry. we can afford in america to be raised, but like india, pakistan they cannot afford. is it any solution? >> yeah, that's a very good question. and a question also that is very much not as publicly, but very much in discussion now in the hole is the united states government. the idea is to look, probably the matter what we do, one of these people are going to get through. and if they do get through and do a small-scale attack similar, and it really disrupts life in this country and is seen as the biggest thing that ever happened to us, then it's going to encourage more of those attacks. and what they are talking about is how do we make the american people understand that it may occur at some point a small-scale attack, but that we have to then go on with our lives. we can't make it to the people on the end or it's going to encourage more of the same attacks. and i don't think they've come up with a way of doing that and i don't think they've been to public about it because on the federal government is going to step aside say attack, don't worry about it. they're not going to say that. but there is a discussion based on the point going on for a muchness, very important if they get through in a small-scale attack that we don't make them the biggest thing in the world because that just encourages them. we called publius and so there's nothing can do basically to disrupt the american way of life. that'll be the best things we can do if one of these guys does get through. but that's a question. >> joshua vocal. he talked about information sharing earlier in her talk. and i was hoping to get your thoughts on the potential for implementing standards and practices for integrated risk management throughout the country and what your thoughts would be as if that would be helpful in terms of thwarting terrorism in the future. >> integrating management of what? >> integrating risk management. >> yes, yes. in fact, this can be enormously helpful. and of course the biggest ally we have on this was probably the air. and a lot of companies have done that now. we go over at over at least once a year we go over with the board of directors for procedures we have for risk management, what would happen to the records and everything else and what were going to do in case there was a disruption. we also, companies, some of you may have thought his son go through drills. and if something happened to the building, might not be in and type it might be a natural emergency of some sort. what happens to the employees? how do you congregate, heidi keep in touch? had to make sure everybody's all right? and there are plans and i believe most of the management, all of the very major corporations and it's spreading out to smaller business, but yes, this kind of integrated risk assessment unit dates and cities are doing them. i talked about with mayor bloomberg of new york as this continues to be the threat. and it's a lot better. i mean, it's a lot better. when 9/11 happened no one knew who was in charge. we were talking about this earlier. you know, it was the first one on the scene. the fire department got there first. they were in charge. nobody really knew who was in charge. well, he centralized it. so he's taken whatever the political risks were staying on rate, the police department, you're in charge. and the police department has no anti-terror union. they have some people abroad who are working with them into the city itself. but the police are the ones who were in charge in case of the incident. in every city out to do that. every state ought to do that. everybody ought to know. and it's not just terrorist attacks. its hurricanes, floods, whatever the emergency is. when an emergency strikes it's too late to wear them who's in charge. everybody should have a plan. i know they have in male state of new jersey, new york. i'm just not sure about the president country. scream if you told us a lot about the value and the obstacles that have changed in the fbi, and congress, local police departments. if there was one change, just one change that you could magically produce over the next day two years, what one change would that be? >> you've heard me. i'm tempted to say the congress. [laughter] >> if there's one change, i think still we have so many -- i mean, this is a very, very difficult job. we have millions of bits of information coming in all the time and coordinating, let alone sharing is immensely difficult task. there isn't anybody believes it easy. if there's one thing i can do, it was make that information sharing and less so you had an area where it all came in and you had top analysts who were paid and recognized for what they do. and they're there to make that to prevent these things. >> hello. samir daniels, ramsey decisions. governor bergen, i'm very concerned that the whole issue of the quality of intelligence. and when i say that, i went to distinguish it a saying that i believe they've been intelligent isn't intelligent. and from that vantage point, i think that unless the quality of intelligence in the analytical product and language skills and these things are not improved, you're going to be spending the wheel. and i think, i'm sorry to say this. am i a deep respect for elite and io, but i just think that your dealing with this at a level when the problem is that another level. >> well, the reason i am pointing out the importance of analysts is to get what you're talking about. and it starts at one level. we collect the information and then it goes to another level. we analyze the information and share it presumably. that's a counterterrorism center. and then it goes up to leaders, hopefully understand what they're getting and can transmit that inform policy on that basis. it is very important, for instance, who and how the president gets his daily briefing. now, each president doesn't differently. president bush, the last president bush like to have people come in and tell him in the morning, verbally, what the threats were and all that. this president likes to read it because that way he gets information. and then he called somebody wants to talk to them about it. but it's very, very important that the right person be there. we said we thought it ought to be the dni. the department of natural intelligence. which are absolutely right, the whole system doesn't work if it breaks down at any level. and it's got to go right up to the president and ultimately the president has got to be responsible. >> again, sorry to hog the mike. my name is robert duval. governor, thank you for coming out. i spoke earlier about the soft power approach and you're talking about soft power like we did in world war ii. the soft power is the japanese picking up bobby sox, not by force, have been attracted to the attractiveness. this is not what i want to speak about, but she talked about reaching the police forces of america. before i retired from the navy about four years ago, i attach pieces of the world at the terrace. and i did speak to local commanders. i did a presentation with a terrace to sheriff jim. sheriff jim is in the central state. and he asked me, you are from d.c. what does that mean to have these color choice? what do i do when they're fuchsia. what do i do when we're at orange? and i told him, we need to communicate better. i want to appreciate that question. had we can indicate better to 300 million americans? but the key for the detectors on the teens. >> absolutely essential. the first thing i think we have to recognize is we don't want to scare anybody. that isn't helpful. but we've got to let people be concerned and we've got to let them understand what this new threat may be. and probably if they see something, this is the weight change. for instance, right now, i'm sitting on the plane. i look across the aisle and somebody thought issue. i'm going to jump and so is everybody else on the plane. that's new. never would've happened before. we've got other people is what they see something suspicious they know where to go to and they know where to call. but then that's the first link. the second link is who they call has got to have confidence. you know for years, the federal agencies sort of look down at the agencies on local police and his hierarchy of things. now it's got to be much worse in less in this kind of work. it's got to be the citizen and the local law enforcement persons, knowing just who to call them that call getting paid attention to people at the level and evaluating. now they're working on that. this is not new. they're working on it. it's difficult. it's difficult because it began over coming years and years and years of doing something another way. but we all know that has to happen. and i honestly believe the federal, state and local agencies are now working on it. and i know i have talked to local police to tell me it's not the way it is like to see it, but they get a lot more respect. and it is starting to happen. >> sir, can i just ask a question to follow up on the earlier comments about business across the administration. he would've great story about prout president bush likes to see president obama. could you expand a bit. you watch how the administration coming. there's undoubtedly pluses and minuses. could you help us understand that as we've seen a change of administration, have areas that have gone better, areas he might've expected more? can you help us get a better sense? >> yeah, have great respect for the people of president obama has appointed. the people i've worked with, janet napolitano and the first-class cabinet member. there are a number of other people who are intelligence area, director of the fbi, bob moeller at think is one of the best public servants i've ever worked with. so the people are good. because his administration was so dominated by 9/11, the bush administration has spent tremendous resources, tremendous interest, did a lot of good things and things that may not be so good, but they were concentrated in the area. this president has been distracted, understandably so, by all sorts of other things. when i tried to get our health care bill through on an economy that simply doesn't seem to respond with whatever they've been trying to do to it to all sorts of crises in one area or another. and occasionally, to be honest with you, the eyes come off the ball. but i think what we've got to understand is they can't in this area do matter what else you're doing, you always as president of united states have got to pay attention to this area. because keeping the american people safe is more important. that's what we elect governments for. we've probably formed our first government when we were engaged because we wanted to keep it safe or whether animals are other people or tribes or what have you. so keeping it safe is about the first obligation of government to matter what else you're doing. i don't think you can lecture are straight from that. obama is a president great goodwill. if you want to do a job in this area, he is the intelligence to do it. i think it's got to empower the dni under him and give him whatever presidential authority he needs. and then we're going to move forward. >> well, sir, thank you very much. one of the things we've all learned this were all glad your eyes on this ball. thank you so much for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> we're going to switch gears quickly and were going to start our panel on terrorism. and it's my pleasure to moderate this panel. and i want to introduce to you tube one carle. glenn has then deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats. in that capacity, he led 16 agencies of the u.s. intelligence community in preparing the u.s. government for seniors that the two threats in the united states, to the president, members of the cabinet and the nation's most senior military leaders. this is going to give us an excellent window into the nature of the threat, be able to help us understand complexities of the threat a testament and i think you're going to find that he's a tremendously good person to lead off our panel. so glenn, i'm going ask you to go first. images quickly introduce the other two briefly. then were going to switch over to a discussion of solutions. there's been no more popular solution to solving terrorism and leadership decapitation. jenna jordan is a doctoral student at the university of chicago. she has completed a truly ambitious study, study nearly 300 efforts of terrorist leaders over the last 40 years. this is the largest study of its kind and she's going to follow on. and finally, we have another major issue, which is nuclear terrorism. and especially, how do we think about nuclear terrorism? to help us talk about that issue today, we are specially privileged to have tomas schelling. thomas schelling was one of the great figures, the great thinkers in american national security strategy, pretty much for the last 50 years. thomas schelling and his work, both in strategy of conflict in arms and influence, that's what earned him the nobel prize in economics in 2005. it also, that work has earned him the respect of literally tens of thousands of folks who have come to washington to work on these issues in those decades. people often ask me about nuclear terrorism because of the work i've done. i point them to this day, to thomas schelling's international peace and international security. he will be talking about that piece because he is updated since then. but he remains, i think, the best thing on the subject. so without further ado, we'll start with glenn, go to china and then go to tom. >> thank you very much. it's an honor to be included with such a group of experts sent to have a chance to share what little i know were some little bits of what little i know. secretary of state kissinger long ago, after he finished his service as secretary of state, national security adviser, wrote that when he became secretary of state for the first time or national security adviser he thought now i will have access to all the information, all the resources in the united states government. i'll learn new things, develop new perceptions. i'll be with you think strategically, think great thoughts, three great policy and not be able to know what to do. but he said that all he could do during his terms of service was respond to crises and event and that he had no time to think and doubted whether he had any new thought it all during his terms of service, which is not a sleight of hand. it's a fact that anyone in the position of policymaking or his government bureaucrats certainly struggles with the terror of the inbox. and we all come to be dominated by up to a large extent. my job and the job on the national intelligence council and the job of the national intelligence council itself in its platonic ideal really is to raise our eyes and our perceptions and sea lifted the flow of the river instead of the ripples on the surface to the extent that we can. it's a luxury, it's an honor and it's really hard. but it's a lot of fun. and since that's the mission, we may succeed a little bit more, at least in attempting to have a different perspective than all of our colleagues and i for most of my career who are so terrorized by the inbox in the daily issues we have to respond to. that perspective, the admission of the national intelligence council led me to focus on my work and my thinking more and more on paradigms and on perceptions, on ourselves while doing our analysis of what al qaeda was up to. rather than just on reporting about the enemy. first, we have to understand how it is that how and why we see the reporting and the enemy as we do an attempt to be conscious of what balance and frames are perceptions. and only then can we really make better sense of all the unbelievable amounts of terrorist reporting that we receive and we collect an attempt to collate and interpret. the title of this panel is thinking through the new security puzzle. terrorism and asymmetric threats. but i would suggest that there might be more accurate or profitable for us to say or to think about the misperceptions and mikey and awareness or trying not to choose the fact to fit our assumptions, assuming we can become aware of what our assumptions are. and that leads to a spoke of the terror of the inbox, which is very hard to avoid, to the terror of terrorist threat reporting. when one first to gains access to terrorism reporting from any sort of reporting, but the issue is terrorism reporting, it is overwhelming everyday there are hundreds of reports literally that come in, ranging across an entire spectrum. there is no threat whatsoever and we cannot go to the beach. every muslim is a terrorist that has islamabad in its packet and in between. and it's our job of course to sit through several hundred reports a day, each officer in their thousands receiving several hundred reports a day to make sense for them, to identify what is weak, what needs to be forwarded and how to understand or interpret what it is we receive, assuming we've been able to identify the report that merits analysis and further work. what came from the overwhelming impression the terrorist reporting base, particularly post-9/11, is the paradigm that we all know and that remains operative, even though it's been substantially modified and i would even say discredited. and that is, of course, that terrorism is one. al qaeda and islamic jihad are basically synonyms and that the threat is global, coherent, controlled, link analysis is very important and that there links among terrorist groups in indonesia and in mauritania and they are all controlled some coherent throbbing brain planner and so on, bin laden or his organization. and that they're everywhere. their sheer, who knows where. the rule of thumb figure given for years and years was, but where is al qaeda? al qaeda operates in 80 countries in the world. that was the full position. it was never true, but i won't get into the details at this point unless someone really would like me to. and it was revised. al qaeda was present in 60 countries. that also is not true. and i'm not here to give a prissy about qaeda itself, but the actual number has been basically six countries, seven arguably depending on definitions were al qaeda has an operational presence. the fact director grand central station at some point you could say they're present in the united states. the fact is they were not operating there. .. in north dakota as grand central station. this paradigm murfs over post-9/11 i would say in 2004, 2005 probably became a bit more sophisticated or a nuanced and said al qaeda franchised. leedy treated al qaeda central and the of branches and these branches are linked because we know that abdul mohammed made a call in indonesia and so therefore the al qaeda branch in indonesia is linked with the gicm in larocco, and both of them send someone several years prior to that for trimmings as part of a coherent strategic operation. each of those facts is true. it doesn't imply and i think we have come to see at least an intelligence community using the word link is dangerous because it is taken to me often a more coherent and direct strategic association than we found to be the case. so its franchise, it has branches. osama bin laden have become a global inspiration and motivator and that is a question that is true. although i would say that is true more from a sociological perspective which is important and relevant to counterterrorism analysis, but more as a phenomenon than as a leader pulling strings issuing guidance and so on so although he tries and al qaeda remains coherent and lethal and i will get to that in a moment. but i would say there is more in this franchising or the inspiration rather that al qaeda and bin laden provide more accurate to consider an islamic to give their what deacons -- the che guevara will classmates at all of mine where che guevara t-shirts. he was a hero, he's a mench, leader, he opposes abortion, fight for justice, against the system, put himself on the line. these are usually admirable. and they probably flirted with or were sincerely socialists or marxists. that does not mean a classmate of mine wearing a che guevara t-shirt was part of his fleet to him. i think the phenomenon of osama bin laden and al qaeda and global peace jihadists similar to that. i am not a pollyanna and dismissing it has had bad consequences and effects for u.s. interests and i think for everyone really the muslims most directly but that's not the same phenomenon sociological by which we need to respond as we're from previous speakers on diplomacy in overtime on kinetic means what has bin laden become the saint of jihad and the effect as we saw the data concerning suicide bombing one could make the same point whenever the subject under analyst with respect to terrorism, islam and jihad is that it's happened because islam is responding to current events and actions we've taken towards 9/11, and i am a strong proponent of course we serve our national interest. there's no more of the and all the foreign policy and it's nice to hear that we have moral imperatives to help so and so and such place. the fact is it's more important to me and ensure to all of us that we preserve the life of the iowa farm boy or boston longshore son who is a soldier and interest american interest we sacrifice those lives to protect someone who doesn't have strategic interest were advance american interest worthy as their cause or sorry as their plight might be. this morning to to -- morphing viewed at al qaeda brandt the least important airburst it continues to imagine and approach a far more orders than there really is and a key psychological point. it's human and impose stricter on chaos we cannot coley or interpret chaos so we will protect meaning onto what is incomprehensible even to and second at minimizes and doesn't even include the local regional ethnic historic and culturally and geographically specific issues throughout the muslim world that causes the drivers and catalyst but most not all but most of what we call islamic terrorism today. i would add american policy come to mike and i'm not criticizing policy as a consequence as the previous broker said so finally 30 seconds what is the terrorist today how should we approach it? with its largely with has been. men in small groups around the world hostile to america responding to crisis responding to american actions. there is still al qaeda central that remains couldn't it is the only islamic organization in the world that exists this consciously seeking to strike the homeland of the united states. it is true prior to my antioco 9/11 landstuhl troup. it's changed our actions overseas and the damage we have done to al qaeda. and then finally there are numbers of disjointed individuals inspired by all these events seeking to kill us. >> i know there are going to be a lot of questions especially what's the difference in policy at its 80 countries. that is a big question. what we are going to turn now to jenna. do you need the computer? stock there you go. >> thank you for having me. it's quite an honor to be here among all of these amazing speakers. it's been a really wonderful day. so my project looks at leadership decapitation of terrorist organizations and when i see leadership decapitation i'm referring to the arrests or killing of a leader of a top leader or members of the upper echelon of a terrorist organization. and the reason i look at this and i think that leadership targeting has become a key feature of counterterrorism policies. this slide shows the dramatic increase in decapitation overtime and this is with academics and policy makers argue the removal of leaders is and effective strategy combating terrorism, however leadership decapitation is not always successful and most existing empirical work is an insufficient. most people believe removing a group leader will render it ineffective. and i believe its optimism is fueled by the basic assumptions. first terrorist organizations tend to be headed by charismatic leaders seen as inherently fragile because they depend upon one person with unique attributes. since charisma is often associated with religionocity this model would predict where religious groups should be the most vulnerable to decapitation and accordingly the organizational attributes, things like a group size, age or structure are not so important. the other assumption is based on social network and less specific to leaders and predicts more variability and the success of decapitation. the removal of the actors with the most social tides these of the actors critical to the group communication, logistical support and distribution of information so the removal of these leaders will disrupt organizational leaders and organizational planning and operations. so remove the right person and the organization should be weakened. but we see some groups which have been consistently targeted with little effect so i ask whether to cavitation is an effective counterterrorism strategy. so the answer to this question i constructed a data set of all incidents of leadership targeting from 1945 to 2004 almost 300 cases of various groups and contacts and it turns out the susceptible the terrorist groups to decapitation is strongly predicted by organizational characteristics of size, age and type, the larger and older the more durable. the religious organizations are highly resistant to cavitation and i am explaining these findings in more detail in just a minute. so in a nut shell my analysis shows decapitation does not work. it does not increase the likelihood of organizational collapse become a baseline. in fact, organizations that haven't had leaders removed are more likely to fall apart than those that have. so decapitation did succeed in 17% of the 298 cases i look at all of the finding was put in context. 53% of all terrorist groups that have been decapitated fall apart while 70% of groups that have never experienced decapitation are no longer active so the marginal utility is negative. the collapse 20% less for decapitated groups. this isn't to say decapitation never works. so to understand nine decapitation is likely to be effective i'm going to look at the marginal utility of decapitation for three different characteristics, age, size and type. the data shows that the group becomes larger, decapitation is less likely to be effective and this is the strongest finding in my analysis. the game tall cases of decapitation the youngest group, those under ten years of age fell apart nearly 30% of the time. in contrast decapitation has never succeeded against groups over 40 years of age. so what this slide does it compares the decline based on a group age for groups that experienced leadership to cavitation to those that have not, and at the bottom row is basically the differential rate of decline for groups that have and groups that have not had leaders removed. so the data shows as you can see a peer groups under 20 years of age that has cut leaders removed fell apart 7% less often than those that did not. once an organization crosses the threshold of 20 years, the likelihood that decapitation will feel more than doubles. groups over 40 years of age are the most resistant to decapitation and i think most surprising is the life span of all organizations whose leaders have removed is longer than would be otherwise and this is especially true the older and organization becomes. second i looked at a group size. for groups with fewer than 25 members, decapitation increases the odds of declined by 2%. decapitation is 11% more effective for groups of 100 members and 5% more between 101 to 500 members. i'm basically just going across the chart here. however, once an organization exceeds the membership of 500 the utility decapitation is always negative. so, for groups between 501,000 members, decapitated groups all part 46% less than they would otherwise. so this data also shows decapitation is a counterproductive particularly for the largest groups. finally i classified the groups as religious, ideological or separatist and ideological refers to, you know, sort of right-wing left-wing marxist groups call organizations like that or accommodation. so for a simple hezbollah and hamas are classified as religious and separatist. religious and separatist are the most resilient to decapitation while ideological organizations are the easiest to destabilize. so ideological groups that had their leaders removed fall apart about 7% less data those that have undergone to cavitation are less likely than those that haven't and separatist groups are about 30% less likely to seek activity than the separatist groups that haven't been targeted. so, what explains these findings. in order to understand why the ideological groups are easier to destabilize i argue that organizational resilience, the ability of a group to withstand leadership attacks depends on two factors, bureaucratization and communal support. bureaucratization explains the resilience of large organizations while communal support accounts for the resilience of religious and separatist groups. first, well-developed bureaucracies allow an organization to continue operating and replace leadership after decapitation. if they are the structural moriarty at a level with the organizational administration the should be clear process these to succession when the leaders were moved. second, support from the community in which the group operates is critical to organizational capacity. groups depend upon the support of the local population in order to gain the resources necessary to operate and survive. small isolated groups are more dependent upon leadership than larger integrated groups which require leadership to access an important resources. i'm sorry, smaller isolated groups are more dependent upon leadership to gain access to these important resources. religious groups are deeply rooted so generally these groups tend to have a great degree of local support and are more resilient. so, in conclusion, and sorry i'm wrapping it up here. the findings of this project to demonstrate the need to develop new counterterrorism policies. in many circumstances decapitation is likely to be ineffective and can actually be counterproductive by increasing communal support and particularly when we see instances of leadership targeting that have resulted in the killing of civilians. furthermore curves are capable of learning and adapting and can result in a stronger capacity. finally i want to say one implication that can be john is eliminating in light and is unlikely to affect the operational capacity of al qaeda. al qaeda formed in 1988 over 20 years of age has over 500 active members and of religious and the data i find would suggest decapitation isn't likely to work in the particular case. so i think overall we need to rethink and seriously consider the groups we are targeting our groups against decapitation will actually work. thank you. [applause] thank you. it was probably helpful and understanding of what we are up against. i would now like to change gears and have thus we think nuclear terrorism tom schelling. >> can you hear me? our host mentioned an article in 1978 a couple the second was not in the 1980's, the 1990's it one is tataris organization could get the high enriched uranium or the plutonium fissile material of weapons how they would get a hold of it. second helm they would get the people to make the bomb. i think is unlikely they would acquire a real bomb but we don't talk about. if you to ask me about that later i can answer it. then the third question i also took up in that article was what would they use it for? to block los angeles or berlin portilla feith. first most of the discussion about the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons material has to do with getting it from the original location where it was kept. how good is the custody, the security is the program name as the nuclear threat reduction program has been in effect for almost 20 years and it's been i think highly effective in various respects, but still most people who study the situation think that security wherever weapons grade material is kept isn't good enough, not nearly good enough it isn't even known for sure where all of the stuff is in the former soviet union. to focus on how to steal those of to of is what may be the most difficult part of getting fissile material into the hands of a group capable of using it just by coincidence yesterday by former colleague was one of three people awarded the nobel prize in economics and the work for which it was provided was what is called market searched. how does somebody who has something to sell find somebody who wants to buy it? well it is a common item you can advertise it, open a store front , locate intermediaries who know the field, but if the thing we are talking about is very rare, almost unique, if it is exceedingly valuable worth your life perhaps it the position is illegal you have a hard time disposing of it after you've stolen it. this is to be a problem for years ago the pornographers have in reaching the kids who wanted to buy the pornography how do you advertise canada are to leave the -- without getting caught a few stolen picasso from an art museum? you can't go to the financial times and put in a notice you'll take $60 million or no questions asked. somebody is likely to show up on your doorstep before the customer our lives. and i think that thinking of a summit is in a position to steal the stuff can give it to somebody who wants to give it to a team who can convert it into a nuclear weapon means going through a chain of links difficult to negotiate. the first and delete the person who gets the stuff may have no idea how you smuggle it out of the country he's in. he may not have a good idea of how with the likelihood is the radiation detectors will catch him on the way out. he may not know who to entrust to get it to the terrorist organization. more likely he will hope the terrorist organizations have financed somebody who will take it off his hands for money it but then he's got to worry the amount of money might be such that whoever takes off his hands would rather kill him than pay him once he's got his hands on it then that person has to find somebody else. he can't just buy an airplane ticket to afghanistan or pakistan and go to the nearest police man and say can you tell me how to find osama bin laden? it will work that way. if you think through the problem how can you go through what may and off half a dozen intermediaries in order to reach the intended purchase are taha where people have different customs people recognize it may be hard for the would-be producer of a nuclear weapon to work the whole chain of events particularly if it is known something is missing some people are on guard to look for it. my hope is i have no knowledge of this, but i trust at least the israeli or the russian equivalent of the kgb and actually i hope the cia or some undercover u.s. intelligence agency is perpetually in the markets either pretending it has something to sell or pretending it is something it wants to buy fy think it is known as a sting operation and the most to the to the best way to prevent any organization like al qaeda is to have people numerous in the market either pretending to have something to sell or having the money with which to buy that people would find it really difficult and may not even have the courage to make contact with a potential seller or potential buyer. my fantasy is that a potential buyer and potential seller dance around with each other finally getting together in order for the one of them to make the purchase and the other to make the sale, and they each have passwords according to which it turns out one of them is from the mossad and the other is from the cia and they have to go back and start all over again. anyway now and we talk about the problem my understanding is it takes at least half a dozen exceedingly well trained scientists as a team to put together a weapon once they have adequate cecil material. in addition to the half a dozen well-educated scientists the kind that come from mit and other places in a pretty large team of what you might call people who know how to use equipment in order to construct things with a tolerance to put together something as delicate as a mechanism that will not only be exposed when you want it to but won't explain when you don't want it to come and my impression is this team is going to have to spend upwards of six weeks maybe six months making a bomb depending on how much fissile material they have. could air these are people who will be taken blindfolded someplace away from their families and away from their jobs. they will work together as a team partly as a happy team which may be kidnapping isn't such a good idea. one question is how do you find those people? again there's a problem if you approach a ph.d. computer science and say we would love to have you come help make a nuclear bomb and we will take you to some country you want with the country is in a remote place you will be part of a team that we will pay very well of you help us design and put together this nuclear weapon, and i think that if i were that computer scientist i would think once i held them build the bomb to wide instead of paying with a promised but on the very my lot in the backyard and i can't go to the cia and collect another million dollars for telling them all about it? so i think it's going to be hard to recruit people unless they happen to be available appropriate nuclear engineers and computer scientists and chemists and mathematicians and so forth data of the bill could be counted on loyal to the organization and recognize it is easier to kill them than trust them after they've done their job so getting the team together is almost as difficult as getting the material in the first place. then i ask suppose you do have a team that believes in the project, believes in the organization and wants to help and thinks that terrorism has a role to play stock in getting americans out of the country and that sort. what does this team talk about at supper every night? the can't call the children and talk to them. they can't get on the e-mail and talk to anybody. they can play music. maybe they can watch some television, but mainly here is a bunch of people and my guess is the scientists that is the upper echelon sit around a table of no more than six, eight, ten, 12 people and another 50 million are on the dining hall together, but these ph these are likely to talk about what is the weapon going to be used for, and i have a hunch the end of the first six weeks they will have thought more about that question the in any terrorist in the world or almost any nuclear weapons policy strategist in the world and certainly more than data compare 52 in the head of government. my guess is and i invite you to speculate my guess is these people will decide kind of a waste to kill a quarter of a million people in los angeles or a bunch of germans and they may think about whether it would serve any purpose to kill a quarter of a million jews in tel aviv or in jerusalem. jerusalem would run the risk of a large fraction of the people killed with the palestinians and not jews. it might occur to them that this terrorist organization is about to become either the tenth or the 11th nuclear power and using that power might make more sense than spending it just to produce a quarter of a million dead bodies. they will decide that maybe we will use this for influence except for the two bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki of the nuclear weapons so far have been used if used at all for influence sometimes called deterrence, sometimes called coercion and you can't over -- you don't want to overestimate how good the deterrences worked. nuclear weapons have a per se an excellent record of deterrence between the major east west towers but nuclear weapons didn't deter the north koreans in 1950, didn't deter the chinese at the end of that year, may have toward the chinese when they were about to attack. nuclear weapons didn't be sure anything in vietnam. nuclear weapons didn't detour syria and egypt in 1973. nuclear weapons didn't teacher the british in their war when they were attacked by argentina. nuclear weapons didn't deserve an uprising in afghanistan with the soviets thought they were in charge so nuclear weapons don't have a perfect record of deterrence. nevertheless as they have accomplished anything it's been deterrents except the two in japan and they were effective less because they killed so many people the japanese assumed if we had to in time we did have a third come fourth, fifth, sixth come so forth so that maybe that was an advertisement for the deterrence. then the question arises if this organization has a nuclear weapon how does it prove it? if it says americans get out of afghanistan by next new year's eve or we will blow of los angeles, how do we know they actually have a within? i think that is an overcoming problem. when fidel castro wasn't taken seriously enough by the u.s. government because they thought he was just a fringe leader of a very modest uprising fidel castro arranged to have journalist kidnapped, taken to his place in the forest to the come gave her free range to look around and everything going on for about a week, then blindfolded her again and took her back to where she came from and she was then able to be an eyewitness of the fact he had a much better trained and organized little army than anybody had believed before. so i once talked to a friend of mine at stanford university who was a nuclear weapons designer originally and i asked whether he would volunteer to be kidnapped if a terrorist organization wanted him to see what they had so he could with his own judgment report whether or not they have a nuclear weapon and he decided he ought to do that because if they did have such a weapon would be important for the u.s. government to know that they had it and if he could detect it wasn't a workable device that would be worth finding out and knowing. he wouldn't necessarily need to tell them he thought it wasn't workable. so i think -- i talked about this with the former secretary defense bill perry and his idea was before they start threatening things they have to blow up one weapon to prove they have it and i think that is one way to predict but especially if they have only one human not want to blow it up. i remember the person truman had a recommendation that he should explode one weapon to show it worked and if it did in that would be a bad display and if he only had to and he thought it wasn't he wanted to use up one just to persuade the japanese. anyway, i think these people if they have one or two or three can find a way to demonstrate that they have it, and then my thought is probably but they would do would be to make a demand on the united states. let's say they want the u.s. out of afghanistan. they say we have one nuclear weapon. it is already located in one american city. here is a list of ten cities and one of them is the bomb, boston, baltimore, charleston south carolina, houston, los angeles, seattle, you name it and the bomb will go off early in the morning next new year's day of the u.s. troops aren't out of afghanistan and then what happens is they make that known to the american public. if the u.s. isn't out of afghanistan by christmas, tens of millions of people will evacuate their homes to see which one of the city's is blow not. it would be a very effective threat to make. if they're sitting around this team of people discussing the most important thing in their lives and they may have a variety of ideas about how the within can be used for all kind of good purposes including perhaps purposes that it worldwide support. i will give you one more look simple and then i will shut up. in an article i mentioned i ask what could a terrorist organization have done neither a palestinian organization or any pro palestinian. if they had a nuclear weapon took the is release depended very much on the u.s. supplies of ammunition spare parts and equipment and not a single nato country would allow the u.s. air supply to land and refuel anywhere in europe. portugal controlled and was willing to let the united states refuel and by refueling the u.s. was able to supply twice as much as it could have supplied it couldn't refuel. therefore i thought this terrorist organization said we have already introduced a nuclear weapon in the vicinity of that airfield if the refueling doesn't stop within a week we blow up the airfield. everybody here is formed to evacuate. at that point i thought it's either the americans or the portuguese government or the people that man the airfield beside that the refueling will stop. it would stop, and then they would advertise all they had accomplished was to keep the united states, which had no business in the middle east from participating actively in a war which wasn't any of their business and i thought unlikely to push with a stop the fuelling but to get universal credit for having not blown up civilians or anything of the sort but the united states to stop eating the other side of the war. anyway, that's mike hedge and i hope you can think about is to make excellent, tom. we are going to take some questions. thank you. [applause] we have a number of provocative issues here on the table. al qaeda wasn't in 80 places, but six, decapitation evin osama bin laden me and we aren't thinking seriously enough about nuclear terrorism because we are so scared we aren't thinking for the problem. yes, sir. >> ayaan fascinated by the figure of al qaeda. the couple said its 100 in the general jones said 60. if tauter are we scared of 60 wahabis? i asked a pakistani boy why he wore a t-shirt with osama bin laden. he said it scares the americans in the army to read on decapitation -- >> could we limit -- why are we not clear about the number of al qaeda and what we are using children to scare people? >> excellent. thank you. the number of wahabis. >> the issue of how large is al qaeda and where are they has been contingent one since well before 9/11, and as with any intelligence subject, you will have as i mentioned the spectrum of answers provided each day in reporting so it comes to interpretation and skill and ability and then at the dates as assessments move their way up the chain of command. >> a very good. yes, sir. >> david mercer, mercer and as a seat and my question goes to jenna and you, bob on the have you how they compare it and why we haven't heard that as a comparison. >> there are cases it has been successful for sure. from my study at least the specifics i'm talking about our looking at all cases across the board so generally these are the things we find so there are exceptions. i selected a few other cases more than that so in order to understand but flexible decapitation effects against a group like in peru swithin sort of go inside the case and try to find what is it about this organization that ultimately made them susceptible so in my research i find a lot of what it comes down to is the two logics i'm talking about which is the level of the bureaucracies and or the degree of camille support and a lot of the susceptibility we can trace to the variation in the kind of structure of the organization of the upper levels, hokies and organized its capabilities are and the degree of specialization and then on the other end, the sort of variation and the degree of support from the growth over time some of the variation can be captured by looking at the story in the organization. i hope that answers your question. >> the question for me is why some occupations and not others. the answer is there are additional risk factors that make some occupations worse. some have to do with the intensity and atrocities but there's a special logical attention to this is the social distance between the occupied year and the local community. the broader the distance the more likely the local community is to fear in its way of life and by the way one of the best indicators of distance are different religions so that is why we often see occupations where we have different religions between the occupier and the occupied escalating. on will stop there. we can take one more question. yes, sir. >> right in the middle. >> lamborn about decapitation. if you look at the organization's collapse, what about losing the effectiveness even temporarily? is that part of what you look like at orders that part of the next study? >> i've been criticized for having a strict measure of success, so basically in my study, the organization has to essentially be enacted for two years to count for success and one of the reasons i do this is to make policy prescriptions and every two years the terrorist organizations designated collis i wanted to have some sort of policy relevance, but i do also look at sort of a organization more in depth in order to look at changes and the legality and the what melody and frequency of attacks over time so wi-fi is there a lot to live in a lot of variation among the cases are looking at, but generally if that's the kind of interesting -- i have to look at this more extensively but in a few cases i've looked at what we find is generally the organizations become more frequent and more lethal just following instances of decapitation so i think a lot of this might be due to the retaliatory motive of groups and can emboldened people to join organizations, things like that. but that's actually something i sort of intent in my book to look more at the variation and frequency of a attacks. >> the next panel is in the wings but please join me in thanking the current panel. [applause] thank you so much, bob. as you can tell bob and i are going back and forth with the responsibilities of the day and i am now going to take over the next exciting session titled through the fall of the war homeland security and civil liberties and -- [inaudible conversations] joining us on the stage we've got my colleague, peter, bellinger on the foreign relations and the institute for social policy and understanding. thank you all for joining us. [inaudible conversations] and i didn't put the full title i wanted to on this particular panel. recently some of you in the audience i know participated in the washington ideas forum sponsored by the atlantic monthly and the aspen institute and i had the honor of being one of the producers of this meeting. we had a meeting with mike mcconnell the former director of national intelligence and tina hardman participated, and policy planning at the state department, several congressmen from senator whitehouse, it was an interesting it roundtable the recording of which is online at the atlantic monthly web site. but in it we had a discussion in which jane harman initiated and henry slaughter and others jumped on in which said it's not just the fall of the war is of the law. and i am mentioning this cautiously because john bellinger who can no -- now go behind and i am doing when the jane harman on the subject but it's the fault of law in dealing with a very different kind of warfare where i think many people felt the legal lubber tavis we used to have in some ways this is debatable but it doesn't in fact give us what we need and during a controversial and provocative period of time, in responding to this a set of legal environments were created. they are sort of gray zones, and my friend, john bellinger who i mentioned during the bush administration was one of the key -- and i don't want to say moments of principles but period of principal in the bush administration who fought tenaciously inside the bush administration over the question on the fall of the law, and he and other colleagues said that as well. of course john bellinger was the senior legal advisor to the national security council he was a glut of wizards secretaries there does the department, serve the entire eight years the bush and mr. and we work together in the senate years ago he was on the senate select committee on intelligence. we were buddies back then on the accounts on foreign relations and went rafting down the german rivers of the time that we've been friends and i have enormous respect for john bellinger particularly on the weld reported battles he has a david addington and others which had jumped professor we have the icon himself and knows more about osama bin laden than anybody else i think other than osama bin laden and that is peter bergen of course. peter received it to retreat from thomas kane for those of year when he referred to the person highly informed the mine 11 commission he paid tribute to the work that peter had done. peter is a also a print and television journalist whenever there's a new tape you will see and with old blister and all sorts of folks on cnn. peter is probably the best known commentator on terrorism out there. he's the author wholley war eink inside the secret world of osama bin laden, also the osama bin laden i know and the history of al qaeda's leader and i don't have it in front of me but i know he set out to release yet another book hopefully he will share with us and he code directs the americas counter strategy program at the new america foundation's it is a pleasure. the order we are going to do this i'm going to ask john to speak first and he will join at the podium and then have zalmay khalilzad and peter rutter bandoliers the 60's and some great have peter chasing the lawyers. so, john bellinger. and thanks, steve. it's important a time like this i suspect i missed the introduction this morning but that's why you're doing it because we are at the halfway mark in the obama administration on the eve of the e election two years through and looking at what might change the next few years and that is what i would like to talk about with respect to counterterrorism policies looking backwards and forwards. then candidate obama of course campaigned both domestically and to the extent a candidate can campaign internationally he did on reversing the bush should administration counterterrorism access and restoring the u.s. image in the world. so looking over the last two years i think we have all seen some major changes most of those major changes can on the second day of the president's term with respect to the three executive orders he issued on the second of all policies and detention programs to see what ought to be changed. that was of course but with huge claim internationally at the time and expectation of momentum change. essentially that is the last time we saw in the momentous change. since that time there has been more continuity than change in counterterrorism policies from the bush administration through the obama administration and let me be clear since some of you know in the room and others i don't when the executive orders cannot light publicly applauded them. these were things a number of us inside the bush and administration had been working particularly the second turn of the bush administration for those changes. since that time though, much has stayed the same. the law of war paradigm detaining people of the law of the war indefinitely without trial, to everyone's great surprise particularly internationally the extension of military commissions the whole idea of the global war on terror the administration has carefully dropped the term of which was disliked around the world with the concept is still there. the idea the united states can use force essentially anywhere in the world against al qaeda, not just in afghanistan. last summer in july the justice department announced the program of condition what continue subject to certain safeguards and much debated now in washington, brolin strikes used some what sparingly before now we are seeing three or four times a week in multiple countries around the world and ticking off a great debate about their legality. from my point of view as a lawyer one of the most significant things that hasn't changed at all is the legal framework for dealing with terrorism and detention particular. you might look at a terrific speech president obama given the archives in may of 2009 in which he laid out in great detail against a backdrop of the constitution and declaration of independence dahuk what his vision was going to be to correct some of these as he called them hasty decisions made by the bush administration, and he said he would clarify the rules and he said in particular he would seek legislation to clarify those rules. he said i would work with congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so our efforts are consistent with our values and constitution. he's also repeatedly said he is reaffirming a commitment to the geneva conventions. he got a terrific applause in his own nobel prize except in a speech a year ago but with respect to the free market the international legal framework nothing has changed. we are still relaunching to hold all the people in guantanamo and afghanistan on its general statute the authorization to use military force act that says nothing at all about the tension with respect to the geneva conventions nothing has really changed. we are the third geneva convention on prisoners of war and protected persons the president is not applying those, so why not? why so little change? part of it is the new administration found dealing with on state actors who attacked you from beyond your borders from the uncovered areas that there are difficult new legal problems the bush at a demonstration wrestled with not a very well, failed numerous areas but there are some hard issues. these people do not fit neatly into the criminal laws that may not apply overseas for the framework nor do they fit into the international regime of the geneva conventions. the other reason of course is tremendous political polarization we have on national security issues as has presented the president from closing guantanamo from getting this legislation and even having federal criminal trials. so after the midterm will we see some change? i hope we will. the last 69 months the white house has been caught in paralysis because they have not wanted to follow through on some of the commitments the president made in his archived speech for fear of being accused of being soft on terrorism so that's why we haven't seen move forward on federal criminal trials on seeking of legislation. starting after the election in that narrow window before the next election i would hope and i assume this is the purpose of the conference here is we will see moderates' come together in the middle that we will cease to see as much what we will continue to see what can we build a consensus in the middle of people who will move beyond the position of the national security issues to try to reach some sort of consensus in particular to seek a uniform detention law so the people we are holding over a long period of time have got some regular from work and some international rules whether it is under the geneva convention or certain aspects of the geneva convention that are set out in what's called the protocol one to the geneva conventions but to have a clear legal framework for the detention and prosecution of people going forward

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