The legacy of 9/11

Dr Lina Khatib

Hello, everyone, and thank you so much for joining this members’ event hosted by Chatham House on The Legacy of September 11 and How the War on Terror has Shaped the Middle East. Needless to say, in the 20 years since September 11, the region has not ceased to be any turbulent than before, and this leads us to reflect on the past 20 years, but also think about the present, in terms of what we’ve learned as people in the policy community and also, in terms of where things could be heading to.

My name is Lina Khatib. I’m the Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House. This event is obviously a members’ event, which means it is on the record. Anyone watching us is free to tweet and spread the word and quote the speakers today. And also, as usual, we’ll be having questions from the audience who are with us today. So, you can submit your questions using the Q&A function on Zoom. Feel free to send the questions at any time during the panel discussion, and I’ll try my best to integrate as many of the questions as possible into the debate.

It is a pleasure to welcome three really fantastic speakers, who will shed light on the legacy of 9/11 and what it means for the Middle East today. Our first speaker and guest is Dr Denise Natali, who is the Acting Director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies in the United States at NDU, and she previously served as the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the Department of State. We’re also joined by Professor Gilbert Achcar, who is Professor of Development and International Relations at SOAS University of London. Last but not least, I’m delighted to welcome my own colleague, Dr Renad Mansour, who is a Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House, and also the Project Director of our Iraq Initiative here at Chatham House.

So, without further ado, we can jump straight into, I think, the big picture question. So, the first question is to Denise. What is the big picture regarding US policy? When we talk about the war on terror and the Middle East, September 11 is obviously a unique event in many ways, but at the same time, it is not something that has been a complete departure from a lot of the policies that the United States had taken regarding the Middle East previously. So, you know, I’d love to hear from you more about this big picture, regarding US policy and the Middle East.

Dr Denise Natali

Thank you, Dr Khatib, and at first I’d like to thank Chatham House and my distinguished colleagues. It’s a pleasure to be on the panel with everyone, to see you today. And secondly, I need to make a disclaimer, that my views today are my own and not those of the US Government, the Department of Defense or the National Defense University.

Just a couple of points I would like to make. First, 9/11, I don’t see 9/11 as the sole impetus for change of policy. It was certainly a very important event, and I will indicate some of the effects, but there were other issues taking into account of that context, policy, economics, regional dynamics. Secondly, this was changing over time. We’ve had 20 years since 9/11, so when I discuss some of our responses, our responses, even two years ago, were not the same, or a year ago, were not the same as they were 20 years ago. So just taking context and other issues, but if I would say there’s one thing that – what were we doing before?

Well, we continuously engage with the Middle East militarily, we used the Middle East, we acted as a security guarantor. The United States did, to address our own threats, with our regional allies providing stability. We addressed human rights. We pursued a democracy promotion agenda, that was throughout the 90s, even before, but particularly in the 1990s, that agenda of advancing human rights, righting the wrongs of the past, assisting newly independent states and autonomous groups. You know, all of these types of levels of engagement of the US was actively engaged. We were part of the context before.

What did it do? What did 9/11 specifically do directly, in my view? It altered the threat perception. So, and what emerged from that was the Bush Doctrine, to look at counterterrorism and threats to the US homeland as a priority, not only containing Iran and Iraq. And containment policy was our policy previous to that, although Iran and Iraq remained important in this policy, this Doctrine, if you will, played out, as you indicated, Lina, in the global war on terror. And when you had the global war on terror, now you’re looking at focusing on in a very more distinct way, non-state actors, terrorist groups, as a concerted effort.

But if I have to say, generally, what did this do from this perspective? It really reinforced, if you’re sitting where I am, the two – US engagement, and there are two distinct groups and initially, and that reinforced the liberal interventionists that we have, and it reinforced the neoconservatives. Both for two different reasons, but both coming together, creating a very powerful force, which meant we need to remain engaged. Engaged militarily, to project US power. We need to maintain – remain engaged even more so, politically, diplomatically, and in a humanitarian way, to assist peoples, you know, and to stabilise these countries. So, these two areas of changing the way – our focus on terrorism and preventing the – and protecting the US homeland, but also, remaining engaged.

Now, what has changed since then? And I would say, quite frankly, it was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, if you ask me what really had an impact on the stability of the Middle East, I would say that that issue played an equally if not important role. And I’m going to leave that to Dr Mansour to go into those details. But nonetheless, you had then changing regional dynamics; Iran playing a greater role, proliferation of non-state armed groups. All of these things, whether they be second and third order consequences of 9/11, and engaged increasing US interventions. We had regime change, we had a lot of things going on at this time.

Now, fast forward, what has changed? We have now a very different, let’s say, threat calculation, different resource constraints, different energy issues. The United States is no longer dependent, since 2019, on Middle Eastern oil. We’ve had failures in our regime change. We have now domestic concerns that we’re focusing on. We do not have the domestic support for engagement today, as we did 20 years ago. So where we had the war on terror and large levels of engagement, we have now cause for greater restraint, and ending forever wars, and you’ve heard that phrase.

So that is where I’m going to leave this, ‘cause I’d like to have time to discuss this, but we’ve almost gone full circle. These other issues do matter, but it’s – you’re unlikely to hear as much of the words of democracy promotion and engagement and military intervention, as opposed to, let’s say, circumspect engagement, and then I’ll leave it at that. Thank you.

Dr Lina Khatib

Thank you so much. I think this is a very good overview of where we are and where we are now and as you can – you know, as you just said, there are, of course, many parallels. I bet many people would disagree though with the need for continuous engagement, and we’re hearing that through lots of public messages actually coming from the US. In a way, people may think that, “You know, this is not really the US’s problem any more. If it doesn’t threaten the US national interest in a very direct way, then why should US even bother?” So, on that note, I want to turn to Gilbert for his reflections on this particular angle that is being taken by people, which is quite often reflected, I would say, Professor Achcar, in the left’s discourse, I would say, quite prominently these days, which is the anti-interventionist, kind of, discourse, why, you know, some people think the US and the UK and others, the international community at large, should just leave the region be. What’s your take on this issue?

Professor Gilbert Achcar

Yeah, thank you first of all, Lina, thank you for the invitation, and good afternoon to everyone. Yeah, I mean, if you remember 9/11, well, that was 20 years ago, I think most participants here may remember that. One phrase that you heard a lot was, “A chicken coming home to roost,” you know, and actually, that’s what we have to start with. 9/11 was not a starting point, and that’s what you said in your initial remark, Lina, but it was itself already a consequence. A consequence of a whole set of policies, but most importantly, I mean, we are speaking a lot about the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, but much less about the 30^th anniversary of the Iraq war, the first one, of 1991.

And I think very arguably that event was more important, in terms of world historical events than 9/11 itself. Of course, 9/11 was very spectacular, but the war on Iraq of 1991 was the first major war waged by the United States since Vietnam. That is, it had to wait 17 years or more, 18 years, to resume engaging into a large scale war. And that large scale war was really a defining moment for the Middle East and for the global world, because that coincided with the end of the Soviet Union, which was collapsing. You know, 99 you had the Berlin Wall, 1990 you had the reunification of Germany, and then, at the end of 91 no more Soviet Union.

And that war was used also by the United States as a, kind of, live demonstration of the power of all the arsenal accumulated under Ronald Reagan, with the highest, the most expensive armament programme in US history out of war, you know, in peacetime. And if you look at the war itself in Iraq, it did not content itself with the official goal, which was kicking out Iraq out of Kuwait, just to remind everyone, that was done as a result of Iraq’s, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. But that war was also used as an occasion to destroy the whole infrastructure, if you like. It had devastating consequences, which combined with the embargo that came later on, were really, really a hugely devastating policy. You know that by UN estimates, the excess mortality due to – related to the embargo that you had after the 91 war, was 90,000 persons per year, the majority of whom were children under five. So just calculate what it means for 12 years of embargo.

So that is what – the moment when, actually, Al-Qaeda shifted from fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan to fighting the United States. They – that’s the moment when Al-Qaeda turned its weapons against the United States, on the occasion of that war, of the intervention, the deployment of US troops in the Middle East. So, instead of, how to say, drawing the lessons of that, when you had 9/11, instead of looking at 9/11 as the blowback of this terrible moment, what you had is an administration, indeed, full of neoconservatives and other such people, with a lot of hubris, believing that, you know, now the time has come to consolidate the next American century, you know, the project for the new American century, to whom most prominent members of the Bush administration belong – the Bush, George W. Bush, of course.

And they went into these operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, completely disregarding all the strategic lessons drawn from Vietnam during the 80s. They went into, you know, an occupation, into a protracted, kind of, war situation, with all the consequences of that. And what we have seen is there, total failure and much bigger than the Afghanistan failure, about which there has been a lot of comments recently, was the Iraq failure. Iraq is much more important strategically for the United States than Afghanistan. The United States engaged much more troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan. If you look at the number of troops, for six years you had very limited numbers of troops in Afghanistan, whereas you had much bigger contingent in Iraq, and that was a total failure, and there, it wasn’t the Taliban. It was Iran that prevailed, after the United States, so it’s – I mean, by any angle, from any angle you look at it, and that was the biggest defeat, and then you had Afghanistan.

And finally, let me say what we’re getting also as a result of these policies. Well, Al-Qaeda did not exist in Iraq before 2003, then we had the Al-Qaeda, then we had ISIS, right? And now we have ISIS in – I mean, the Islamic State of Khorasan, the Islamic – the IS branch in Afghanistan. And that’s what we’re getting, I mean, these policies are engendering the reactions and the responses by feeding into, by fuelling war terrorism. And of course, there is a very, very urgent need for a radical change in US policies, what it should be when, in my view, the starting point is to be consistent with the values that the United States pretend that it is the beacon of at the global level, democracy, human rights and all that. And if there is any part of the world where the United States has completely disregarded these values historically, that’s definitely the Middle East.

Dr Lina Khatib

Thank you. I mean, I do want to come back to you to follow-up on that, and also to Denise, but Iraq obviously looms large, and on that, Renad, stabilisation in Iraq, state building in Iraq, we keep hearing these buzzwords. We’ve heard a lot about Iraq already in this discussion. So, how has US policy impacted all that in Iraq, in your view?

Dr Renad Mansour

Thank you, Lina. Can you hear me?

Professor Gilbert Achcar

Yeah.

Dr Renad Mansour

Hello?

Dr Lina Khatib

Yes, we can now [pause]. Okay, and now we can’t hear Renad anymore. Renad, are you back online? No, okay, it seems that we’ve lost Renad, which gives me the opportunity to actually ask you that follow-up option there, which relates to the, you know, the question I originally posed to you. Oh, here’s Renad. Well, let me just follow-up with Gilbert anyway, and then we’ll come back to you, Renad. So, if this is really, this big failure that you’re talking about, Gilbert, does this mean that those people who I quoted who say the US should just do nothing, ‘cause engagement has been just catastrophic, what do you say to that?

Professor Gilbert Achcar

Well, as I said, I mean, I think there is a need to support people fighting for democracy, human rights, and women’s rights globally, but that’s not by occupying their countries and putting in power corrupt people, as happened both – in both Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s a very different thing. The United States – I mean, I’m sure that at the Pentagon if they – if you wanted – if you asked them about anything that they would believe to be successful in recent years, they would probably point to what they are doing in Syria and fighting ISIS with the Kurdish forces, okay? So that’s there, you have a force that is popular in its own milieu, you know, among its own people, there are – there are definitely, those Kurdish forces, are definitely – have a real social base, and they are not corrupt. They have maybe other problems, but they are definitely not corrupt. No-one has described them as corrupt and they have been doing the fighting with US support. So that has been much more successful than anything the United States has done beyond that, you know.

So, although it’s a limited thing, but the whole fight against ISIS in 2004 was based on local forces, and actually, in a sense, the Obama administration has drawn – had drawn the lessons of the failed interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan, with – and with – you know, it did not repeat that. It relied on local forces on the ground, which had a real consistency, and that was the – I mean, I mentioned the Kurds of Syria, you had also the Kurds in Iraq, but also the, paradoxically, the pro-Iran militias in Iraq, which in itself point to the major failure that we mentioned about the occupation of Iraq.

Dr Lina Khatib

Okay, thank you, so basically you are of the, “Let’s not paint everything in one colour,” perspective. Some things are needed and are successful even in a limited way, but the big picture is also problematic. So back to Renad on Iraq, in terms of the problematic big picture.

Dr Renad Mansour

Thank you, Lina, and sorry about that. The minute that I was going to speak, everything just fell apart, but I’m happy to be back and part of this discussion. I think, and I agree with Gilbert’s argument, that 9/11 isn’t – you know, you can’t view it in isolation of the continuities of history in this region and US intervention. The US was, you know, bombing and engaging in Iraq throughout the 1990s. Even 2003, you know, there are connections.

But I think something that I notice, and there’s two, kind of, issues that come up in 9/11, when it comes to understanding Iraq and US policy in Iraq, and also not just the US as a government, but the role of think tanks and Analysts and Journalists in trying to understand the Middle East. One is obviously looking at Islamic, sort of, Islamist radicalisation, with Al-Qaeda, which was in Iraq before 2003, it was in the Kurdistan mountains throughout the 1990s, but there is a, sort of, interest in that.

And the second one is an interest in state building. And if you look at the National Security Strategy of 2002, so just, you know, a month after 9/11, one of the quotes that sticks out to me is that America is now threatened less by a conquering state than we are by failing ones. And so, I think, after 9/11, a lot of the intervention in the region, whether it’s by the US Government, or the understanding of the region and its complexities and particularly its conflicts, comes from this idea that failed states are a direct security threat to the US, because in Afghanistan, for example, they facilitated a group like Al-Qaeda. Or Saddam, at his time, although, you know, some could look at the Saddam regime, obviously, as I say.

So, I think that becomes what we’re still living in. A lot of the work that we do is understanding the roots of these problems are assumed to be the failures of these states. And so, the US then goes to Iraq and goes to Afghanistan with this agenda to rebuild states, right, as a security problem, but really what you see is rebuilding states, kind of, with a fundamental misunderstanding of what the state looks like in these countries or what it, you know, what the realities are, with the – or a different rubric of what it should look like, and that becomes problematic. But from examples in Iraq, how the US wanted to rebuild the state was to, kind of, bring all these communities together and to create an ethnic sectarian type of political system that then becomes militarised in surviving, so that backfires.

Another big problem was that the US could, through the military, pursue state building. And so you see all of these ‘mission accomplished’ announced, that by military means you can bomb out groups, that you can remove people that are problematic and somehow everything else will settle into this perfectly functional state. Every US President, since 9/11, since 2003, has declared some, kind of, mission accomplished in Iraq, beginning with George W, Bush, by – particularly after the invasion.

So, to me, really, what we see and what the legacy of 9/11, which we’re still living in, is this focus on this type of state that is representative, that is democratic, that is, by most means, formal, governing these countries. But I think what we’re seeing in Afghanistan and what we’re seeing in Iraq is often the image of a state that Americans and the coalition of Britain and the Europeans have been pursuing, isn’t necessarily what they’re getting. And instead, what you have is really failed socioeconomic and political systems, I think, in these countries.

Dr Lina Khatib

Okay, thank you. So I want to circle back to Denise on all that. I mean, I’m also looking at the Q&A to see what questions have been sent by people, and please, anyone in the audience, I encourage you to send your questions in the Q&A. There seems to be a general questioning of this issue of war on terror, was it worth it, was it actually successful, was the whole Afghanistan issue after September 11 20 years of US presence and engagement and intervention, was it all a waste of time? So, what would you say to that?

Dr Denise Natali

Thank you. I definitely don’t have enough time to answer that question, but I’ll give you some thoughts, just a couple. First, I’d want to clarify some points, because there’s been a lot of conflating, perhaps I wasn’t clear. This is, to me, it’s not a matter of either we’re engaging or we’re not engaging. It’s a spectrum, and there’s different levels of engagement.

Secondly, there is a foreign policy elite community who is supportive of continued engagement. There’s also a domestic population who is not. So, you know, there is a difference even within populations itself. When I talk about engagement, look what happened, how difficult it was last year, when the President called to disengage from Syria, and there was a lot of noise not to do it, while on the domestic population perspective, people wanted to. So just on that, we’re on a spectrum.

Now, your question was, you asked me again about Afghanistan. Look, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction Report, it’s called the SIGAR Report, just came out again. July 30th, it’s the 52nd report, and it explained or discussed again its evaluation of what 20 years of engagement in Afghanistan was about, and they’ve been doing this quarterly. So, there’s some lessons learned picked out from there, and there were some successes. I’m not talking about just militarily, did we push out Al-Qaeda, did we – you know, we captured, obviously, we killed bin Laden, we did capture many of its leaders, we weakened some of these forces. But if you look at this report, submitted to Congress, there were some, say, successes, or some improvement: healthcare, women’s maternal care, education. But largely, there were many failures.

If you’re going to assess this, in terms of reconstruction and stabilisation, clearly, there were many, many failures. I mean, we spent about 150, $45 billion for reconstruction activities, and we still have a great deal of instability. Many programmes – so I can give you a list. There’s seven main lessons identified. So, was it worth it? Should we continue to push back terrorists that we can – whose influence we can diminish? Sure. Did we do the reconstruction right? No. No, we did not, and that was again, I think this SIGAR Report says it – lays it out quite nicely.

And third point I want to make, for these reasons, why, you know, and this is not just a few people saying, “Our efforts to stabilise conflict-prone areas,” it’s not just Afghanistan, by the way, we have Syria, Libya, we have Iraq. Why they failed, this is why the United States Congress passed the Global Fragility Act. They did it for the very reason, not because we’re not supposed to engage, but we have to engage in a fundamentally different way, because of the lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, which were failures. And this is why, while I was at the State Department, we crafted, with our colleagues across the interagency, the US Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability. Again, based on failures, lessons learned, and doing – and let’s just say, stabilisation in a very different way than we did it in the past. So it’s not about not engaging, but it’s about engaging in a fundamentally different way. Thank you.

Dr Lina Khatib

Thank you so much. If I may follow-up on one thing, which is right now, in the current debate on Afghanistan, it seems that the US is mainly saying that the key concern right now in Afghanistan is terrorism, with IS being the key, kind of, culprit here. So if we take this as an example of what might happen next, does this mean that, you know, what – despite what you’re saying, that there’s a trend, and now we’re talking about where things might be heading to, as opposed to, you know, what happened before. Are we witnessing a change in US engagement that really isolates the issue of terrorism and puts it at the top of the list, with everything else being, kind of…?

Dr Denise Natali

So, right, we’ll separate military intervention and engagement with political, diplomatic and civilian security. I was largely talking about the diplomatic and civilian security. So, let me give you a global, and I’m not speaking for the administration, but there clearly is, and this has continued since – actually since the Obama administration and through the Trump administration, an effort to be more clear on and to hone in what our engagements are that directly impact our national interests. So yes, this is not about completely withdrawing, but the type of large scale, nation building, democracy promotion, you know, tens and thousands of forward deployed troops, seems to me is not going to continue, at least in the near future.

Just, the Iraqi Prime Minister came to the United States, and this is not just, by the way, the United States saying we’re doing it. We have our partners saying, “Please leave. We do not want your combat troops here. We want to have a different relationship with you.” So, you know, and again, I always go back to the US strategy to prevent conflict. If we do not have political will from host country governments, then we cannot be there. These are security co-operation arrangements made in tandem with governments on the ground. We do not have any partners anymore in Afghanistan. So, you know, and Iraqi, our Iraqi colleagues and friends and officials have asked us to remove our troops from the country by the end of the year, to focus largely on training and equipment. So there’s a couple of indications. But to answer your question, yes, I would not expect the large scale troop deployments that occurred in the past to continue in the near future, with a much more focused engagement on counterterrorism and ways to do this more efficiently, over.

Dr Lina Khatib

Thank you. Okay, I want to also hear from Gilbert, but since you’ve mentioned this on Iraq, let’s hear from Renad, your take on what you just heard, in terms of if we – I mean, we all, I think, agree on the importance of Iraq as a file for the US and for the international community at large. So, if the situation is as we’ve just heard, which is the Iraqi Government is basically saying, “We do not want you as troops here. We want things to shift.” How much of this is driven by the Iraqi Government itself? How much of this is driven by regional trends that have been, as we heard from Gilbert, partly the consequence of what happened in 9/11, such as the rise of Iran as a regional force? And how much of this is US pragmatism?

Dr Renad Mansour

Sure, and of course the conversations we’ve been having is, you know, what are the lessons, and the extent to which, I think, what Dr Natali is saying is right, as far as that idea of the US as a power that could just go abroad and build another country, I think has been questioned and challenged, and I think most people won’t believe – they don’t believe that anymore. And I think that’s important as a lesson from the last 20 years, that the US is unable to build international states, you know, states abroad. And I think many academics would be, like, “We told you so,” but there was an attempt for the last 20 years, we tried at least.

On Iraq, and the consequence of this, of course, you know, there’s always this joke in the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, that there are three files since 2003, in the Ministry. You have the American file, the Iranian file, and then the rest of the world. And very clearly, since 2003, it has been the US-Iran, you know, for good, but often for bad for Iraq, as it tries to rebuild its state, or at least make it less fragile, in that sense. Does the Iraqi Government want the US out? I would say no. I would say neither the Iraqi Government nor the Iranians that are openly pushing for US to lead actually want Americans to leave. A pariah state of Iraq is very bad for business, for the Iranians, for the region. I think that the access that Iraq gives to financial markets, to relations in the region, to Europe, to the US, is very important for the Iraqi Government.

And I think what we’re seeing in Afghanistan, which is also clear in Baghdad, is that, you know, the US still does have some importance for the West, let’s say, or international representations in Baghdad. I mean, you still have Green Zone, you still have all of these problematic natures or legacies of the US intervention there. But very clearly, I think that the US Gov – sorry, the Iraqi Government, may not think that you need as many US troops in their country, but certainly they would want to maintain diplomatic relations with the US, and work with the US, but also condemn the US when the US does things like sanction its governmental officials, as well as military strike people within their territory. So there is a, kind of, back and forth relationship, and of course, Iran is, you know, Iraq’s neighbour, and very powerful inside the Iraqi state.

Very recently, on a final point, the Iraqi Prime Minister, I think something that he’s been focusing on, is this idea of Iraq, you know, trying to bring together the region, and he’s, sort of, promised, you know, to appear a few weeks ago, and it’s hard to see where this will go, and of course, there’s a lot of pessimism over whether this will work. But you did have, at least for the day, this symbolic meeting between leaders from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Iran, Turkey and that. So I will leave it – I’ll leave it at that.

Dr Lina Khatib

Okay, thank you. Turning back to Gilbert. You are a Professor of Development and International Relations, and for me, all Professors dealing with international relations should take development into consideration, because I often see a security first approach, that is a main characteristic of engagement with this region, such as this focus on fighting terrorism. How is someone meant to fight terrorism just through military activities? So I wondered what, you know, your take is on this conundrum. If democracy is now not really going to be on the top of the list, then again, is the US doomed to failure in this region? And how do things look like, from the perspective of the region itself?

Professor Gilbert Achcar

Yes, well, you know, of course, I mean, the issue of terrorism, of violence, domestic violence in several countries, Global South countries, but also in the Global North, we’ve seen more and more of that. This is not a simple question. This would refer us to our whole discussion about social justice, about such issues. But international terrorism, targeting specific countries like the United States, this is a direct response to the role of the United States in other countries, you know.

When terrorists target France or the United States, this is – can’t be separated from the role of these countries in the parts of the world from where the terrorists come or from where they originated. They are migrants in the countries. The same applies to Britain, with the attacks you had on British soil. So the, kind of, interference and the, kind of, wars that have been, which have been terribly costly also in domestic terms, and 9/11 of course is – remains in history, will remain in history as the biggest such events. But we had, since then, all those ISIS attacks in France, for instance, and other countries. It’s been a lot of things.

So, in a sense, I think the Pentagon today, the military defence, the military strategy in the United States, is back to square one after Vietnam. They are back to square one of the post-Vietnam lessons, and indeed, we won’t see any major deployment of US troops anywhere, at least certainly not on any protracted base, you know, indefinite agenda, as you had in Iraq and Vietnam. This won’t happen again, at least for a whole period of time. And what we have, paradoxically, what you have today.

I mean, we’re speaking of Afghanistan, but the fact is not many people are mentioning that. But the United States has started supporting, in a way, you know, even if indirectly, the Taliban against IS in Afghanistan, for a while. When Donald Trump, you know, through his, this mother of all bombs, that was one of the first military strikes that Donald Trump engaged in, that was against ISIS in Afghanistan, not against the Taliban. And then we have – there have been reports about, kind of, co-ordination of US strikes helping the Taliban against ISIS. In Iraq, the United States has basically acted in support of, as I mentioned earlier, of pro-Iran forces, pro-Iran militias, in their fight against ISIS.

So we see the United States supporting forces that are not palatable for the United States in and by themselves, but against an enemy that is deemed even worse, you know. And that, kind of, situation, of course, is more comfortable, much less risky for the United States, than the direct engagement of the United States on the ground in the fighting and all that. So when Joe Biden says, “Oh, okay, we won’t have anymore troops on the ground, except, you know, a few, very limited time, if really needed, but we have all these over the horizon capacities.” That’s what he said, capabilities.

Well, at the same time, he, I think, he is not seeing that how much the drone, the use of drones by the United States, has been also a source of resentment against the United States globally. And this is the Obama administration, which increased tremendously the resort to drones, and with a lot of so-called collateral damages, you know. And in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Yemen, so we have, and in many countries, this pattern. This also has to stop. I mean, the United States should stop, you know, acting in ways that lead, especially, to a lot of civilian casualties among others, and creating and feeding and fuelling their resentment against the United States and against its western allies. That’s what the Western countries should understand, I think, and that’s also what I said. I mean, that doesn’t mean that you just turn into full isolationism. And indeed, where there are needs to support forces that are waging a just struggle, that’s something that can be considered, but not in the way this has been done. The post 9/11 wars were a terrible thing.

Dr Lina Khatib

Thank you so much. So, Denise, if I may turn to you, it seems that there’s an impossible task. On the one hand, terrorism is a real threat. At the same time, you agree that the United States has values that, you know, it needs to keep supporting human rights, etc. But we’ve also heard that democracy promotion is not going to be, at least, an explicit part of US policy towards the Middle East. But then, Gilbert is reminding us of the importance of domestic perceptions in the Middle East and domestic attitudes are held that might fuel terrorism. So we have a situation in which the US is, kind of, having to deal with terrorism, having to deal with promoting values, but at the same time, without really going so far in the direction of state building, as Renad was telling us. So, I mean, in your view, what is a healthy balance for the US to pursue?

Dr Denise Natali

Thanks. Thank you, Dr Khatib. I just want to start to – one little clarification. Dr Mansour, I absolutely agree. I meant, when I talked about Iraq, combat troops, not – disengagement on a combat troop level, not as Iraq as a partner, as a normal country that we do business and things like that. So I agree with you.

I have to interject here with something, because so far we’re talking about – it’s almost like the arrow is coming one way. We’re largely focusing on the United States’ external intervention, changing everything, and there’s little accountability for the domestic governance of the governments at hand on the ground, domestic issues. So, the United States should not be acting in ways, local governments and national government should start being responsible and stop being so corrupt and stop fuelling terrorism and all the protests that are going on in their streets as well. So there is no world of full isolationism. I mean, that’s not even an option on the table. As I said, it’s about the way that we intervene, re the US strategy, if there’s not political will, it’s one of the conditions of our engagement. No political will. We did learn lessons and that’s why we wrote the strategy. Then we can’t engage. If we have to measure impact and measure and continuously evalue and assess.

But the reason, another reason why the engagement is pulling out, because of failure. We’ve done this already, for many, many years, and it failed and it didn’t fail because of lack of our effort entirely. There are institutional legacies, historical legacies, lack of political will from local governments, or regional or national governments. There is embedded, a deeply embedded corruption. So when we talk about the Arab Spring or the protests in Iraq today, they’re about their own governments. So, you know, we can’t want this, as I’ve said before at this forum, more than Iraqis. Or we can’t want this more than Afghans or the region. So, you know, the United States is not going to come with its magic wand and say, “Well, we say we’re going to engage and now it didn’t work.” And after a certain point, if you don’t want stability and security of your country, or if you want to continue to rob and thieve your country, then, you know, there’s a certain point where you have to say, “What is the impact of our efforts?”

These are two different – again, I’m largely focusing on civilian security and domestic, I’m not – the counterterrorism component is another, again, scope down, there is the use of drones and other ways to effect that mission, okay? But the policy, you talked about policy. The Pentagon doesn’t make policy. It’s a strategy that implements the policy of the government, is, again, a much, let’s say, we’re drawing down. But it’s not for lack of will completely on our part. It’s because it’s a lack of will from the part of host country governments.

So, you know, external causes in the United States being one thing, there were regional actors, there are our European partners, and there are host country governments with their own internal problems that they have failed to resolve for decades. And after a certain point, you have to ask yourself, are we going to start this institution building progress again, if we don’t see progress on the part of our local partners? Not because we don’t want to, not because people don’t deserve it, because the local people are great. But this is where we are today. So, you know, where are we? There is a much more measured, a much more, I would say, almost say, circumspect. We go in now, clear-eyed, and say, “We have a different approach to stabilisation, and if we don’t see measurable impact or change or progress, then we don’t continue.” And that’s something that we should have done in Afghanistan, and we didn’t. Of course it’s not going to be perfect, but that was the effort made, and therefore, there’s a lot of onus of responsibility on our host. It’s compact based partnerships. So, you know, like the Millennium Challenge, if we don’t have that compact based partnership with the host country government, then we can’t be there.

Dr Lina Khatib

Thank you. I think that’s a key point about leaving or stopping if things aren’t working out and reflecting. So, I mean, I am intimating the questions that are flowing on the Q&A and my own questions to you, trying to, kind of, group them into bigger issues. But this point relates to an actual question by our Deputy Director at Chatham House, Renata Dwan, who’s saying, and I’ll read, “The lessons of the limits of state building, remaking states as Biden called it, have been discussed for many years.” So she’s asking, “What is good enough governance?” So what is good enough? Or, you know, it’s the flipside of what you said, which is, when do you, kind of, say, “Okay, this is not working”? So what is, you know, how can we determine what is good enough, which means it is working?

Dr Denise Natali

So, I love that question, and I’m glad that that was brought up, what is good enough governance? We didn’t make it up. Managing conflict, preventing conflict, but managing conflict, as opposed to, you know, staying in until we see a full-fledged democracy. In most cases, if you look, you can look since Kosovo or the last 20 years plus of war, you’ve seen whether we started off our efforts to create a democratic regime, we ended up sliding down to good enough, right, backing a decent winner. And then, at some point, you have to leave. So what is good enough? I mean, some of it also is in locally legitimate leaders in the eyes of local people. But again, what we’re talking about here is we’re replacing responsibility. Is the responsibility on the side of the international community, the United States? Or is the responsibility on the part of national leaders? And probably a bit of both, but it’s certainly – you can’t dismiss the responsibility that host country governments must play in their own security.

Dr Lina Khatib

Okay, thank you, and I’m going to pick another question to ask Gilbert, ‘cause the question mentions you. The question is, you – paraphrasing, you said that “Intervention and support of a just struggle may be justified,” that’s how the person listening has paraphrased your point. So the question is, how should one decide which struggles are just? Oh, Gilbert, you’re muted.

Professor Gilbert Achcar

Yes, sorry, thank you. Well, I mean, I think ISIS has been an absolutely terrible totalitarian phenomenon, and supporting the struggle against ISIS is legitimate, in my view, for everyone. I mean, not only for the United States or for the Western countries, but also for, I mean, for starting with the populations there on the ground, for whom ISIS has been a nightmare, you know, except the minority who worked with ISIS, but for the rest it’s a total nightmare. So supporting the struggle against this, that’s legitimate. That’s what I mean by a just cause, and that is done not by stepping on the ground, invading and killing massively people and all that, but enabling local forces that are opposed to this phenomenon, and as was done with the Kurdish forces, as I mentioned.

Beyond that, we have to keep in mind something. I mean, you hear a lot today about the credibility of the United States, and this term, ‘credibility’, is always used about the military might of the United States, right? No-one uses this term about something where I believe the credibility of the United States is much lower than its military credibility, which remains of course, we know the United States can destroy any country on earth, right? And this is the credibility of democratic proportion by the United States.

You know, when your forces invade a country like Iraq, launching their invasion from the Saudi Kingdom, and going to Iraq and pretend that they are going for democracy promotion, I can tell you, Lina, and you know that, how many people believe that in the Middle East, how many people believe that the goal is democracy? I mean, if you are starting from the Saudi Kingdom, you are going for democracy? I mean, and that’s the oldest and closest ally of Washington, and has been like this for decades and decades and decades. And we know that, when I started with the chicken coming home to roost, but we know that the support for Islamic fundamentalism had been a key policy of Washington for many years, in alliance with the Saudi Kingdom, as a tool against communism, against the left, against Nasserism, nationalism and all that. And then we still have all this blowback, starting from 9/11 and the rest.

So, there’s a whole pattern. That’s why I said, there has been total inconsistency, and when people speak about values in the United States, I’m sorry to say, but at least in the Middle East we, because I am part of the Middle East, we see in that hypocrisy. We see that this course is completely hypocritical. No-one believes that. Everybody believes that why the United States intervene in Iraq and Libya, not in Syria, well, because Iraq and Libya have oil, and that’s it, and Syria was much less interesting. I mean, that’s how the perception is in the Middle East, and I mean, this is s – I mean, not disconnected from realities. That’s a fact. That’s a fact, that there is a total inconsistency in the pretention of Western politics in the region.

Dr Lina Khatib

Can we just very briefly talk a bit more about Libya and Syria? Because unlike the intervention in Iraq, which was deemed illegal internationally, the intervention in Libya was sanctioned, you know, allowed by the US – sorry, the UN. And when it comes to Syria, we had what I describe as relative disengagement, compared to, you know, the others. As you said, there was engagement in the Northeast with the Kurds, but not much beyond that. So, do you think that Syria, in a way, suffered the consequences of what happened in Libya, because the Libyan removal of Gaddafi did not quite lead to the flourishing of democracy in Libya, and in turn, was Libya also the victim of what had happened before that? So are we seeing a, kind of, cascade of policies that maybe paint this region as damned if you do, damned if you don’t?

Professor Gilbert Achcar

Yeah, well, I think there’s no doubt that the Libyan fiasco, because it was a fiasco in Libya, influenced the way Barack Obama dealt with Syria. But there are other factors. One of them is this neighbour of Syria that’s called Israel, you know. And actually, one of the most important interventions of the United States in Syria, because that was an intervention, which had terrible impact on the ground, was preventing anybody from delivering anti-aircraft weapons to the Syrian opposition. That has been completely decisive, you know, and there was a total veto by the United States against any deliveries by Turkey, by any of the US allies in the region, of such weapons. And that allowed the Assad regime to master disguise, to even use helicopter [inaudible – 57:58] bombs and all that, and later on that enabled Russia to intervene massively without any fear. You know, and that had – I mean, I think history will record that that was the main and most important impact of US policy on Syria, enabling the Syria – the Assad regime to keep this monopoly of the skies over the country. That was terrible.

Dr Lina Khatib

Okay, thank you so much. So, as we approach the last two minutes, I just want to give Renad and Denise an opportunity, one minute each, just to offer any last minute reflections on the conversation today, especially where we could be heading next, starting with Renad.

Dr Renad Mansour

Okay, this will be hard to do in a minute, but I’ll try, and it probably will be more, but I’ll be close to a minute, and I’ve already wasted 16 seconds. I think it’s important to note what Denise mentioned on political will and whether these governments in the region, why are they not stopping corruption. And I think that external interference has a – you know, it’s not only these governments, but these are governments that were put there by the US, advised by the US.

These are also political parties in Iraq that continue to be supported by the US, some of them, right? So it’s less about who is good – you know, who is not corrupt and who is corrupt, but it’s more about who is good and who is bad. A senior US official once told me, when I was pushing this point, “Those who are not shooting at us are okay to deal with.” So, you know, and corruption is an important point in the region, and there are human consequences to corruption. You know, in Iraq, there were two hospital fires this summer that killed over 100 COVID patients. This corruption is intimately connected to US foreign policy, I think. As it is – as much as it is connected to the local politics as well. So, I think it’s hard. I think those who have political will in these countries, in Iraq, are the people on the streets. The protesters have will. They’re going out as a political act, and they’re being killed in the process. But I think bringing back the human side to many of these conflicts and looking at the consequences is important. I didn’t answer your question, but I wanted to say that.

Dr Lina Khatib

Thank you, and Denise, last word to yourself.

Dr Denise Natali

Sure. Thank you so much. We focused largely – you know, it always go back to, the US didn’t do this, and the US didn’t do this, and we initially started – there is an international community. “Oh my gosh, the US, you know, we tripped on the ground, and it’s the US’s fault and now, the wind blew the wrong way, it’s the US’s fault.” Well, we have NATO, we have our European partners, we have the international community. You know, the Libya fiasco, and I agree with Professor Achcar, it was a fiasco. It was NATO-led, and one of this, it’s not just the United States. And, you know, and the people that I dealt with in my previous position, I mean, this was internationally, from our partners, regime change has failed. Or let’s say, externally driven regime change has failed. So we did not have enough evidence to say, “We’re going to continue to do this, because we did it so well.” Not only from the United States. When the Syria – when there was a failure to engage or an inaction or people – this was not just the United States. There were many countries. Nobody decided to go in during the time and say, “Yes, we want to challenge President Obama.” There was a very clear, and let me go – I remember in the United Kingdom, “Let me go back to the Parliament and see if we want to do this,” and the answer was no.

So, we have to just be understanding that this is – I don’t see this, from where I sit, as just the United States. There’s more of a coming to reckoning as United States perhaps is changing the way it approaches, but there is an entire international community of world leaders that are also pretty much on the same path, dealing with the same problems. Economic and resource constraints and their domestic economies, challenges from COVID, climate issues we’re focussing on, pivot to great power competition and the Asia-Pacific. It doesn’t mean there’s not going to be engagement, but I do say, and a closing, that the way that we will do this – remember, you know, and President Biden said this, we have over nearly $2 trillion spent in Afghanistan. About 2,500 American troops killed, more, 75 or 70,000 Afghans. I mean, at a certain point the international community, not just the United States, is going to look at the balance, you know, the balance book, and say, “We have to make – we have to do things differently here.”

So, we’re working – we continue to work with our international partners. We continue to approach stabilisation in a way that cannot be the United States is doing it first and doing it all. And if that means we’ve – that doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned, it means that we’re going to do this in a more – or try to do this in a more responsible way.

Dr Lina Khatib

Thank you so much. I know we’ve had the impossible task of trying to look at the legacy of 9/11 in the Middle East in just one hour. But I have to say a lot of the points that were mentioned today are so important, and so many of them deserve a lot more reflection and discussion, and I hope we can do that, not just as part of the series that Chatham House is putting together, because of the anniversary of 9/11, but more broadly, in our projects and output. So thank you so much to all three speakers for really very thoughtful and spot-on remarks. Thanks to everyone who sent questions and everyone who attended, and see you all again soon.

Dr Denise Natali

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Professor Gilbert Achcar

Thank you.