Is the war on terror over? European and US foreign policy since 9/11

Dr Renata Dwan

Good afternoon, and welcome to Chatham House for our lunchtime panel discussion, Is the War on Terror Over? European and US Foreign Policy Since 9/11. My name is Renata Dwan. I’m Deputy Director here, and we’re delighted to have you join us today. Now, every anniversary of 9/11 evokes powerful memories, powerful conversations. The scale of the attack on that sunny September day, the number of casualties, almost 3,000 people, the impact it has had around the world, resonate to this day.

But this 20th anniversary of 9/11 is particularly fraught. Biden – the US President, Biden, in advance of the anniversary declared that this 9/11 would mark the end of the war in Afghanistan with the full withdrawal of US troops from that country. We’ve seen, over the last month, human tragedy and the scale of that tragedy as the Taliban take over and Afghans, thousands of Afghans, trying to flee the country. And we’ve seen then, in turn, the speed of the Taliban takeover and the declaration of an interim and parity that they intend to formally take on as of tomorrow, the very date of 9/11.

So, it’s a particularly poignant moment to have our discussion today with such a distinguished panel of experts, and I would say also practitioners in the events of the last two decades, to explore whether indeed the war on terror is over. As we start off, perhaps it’s useful to define the end objective, or to remind ourselves of the end objective, as it was defined by the then President George W. Bush on the 20th of September. Speaking to joint sessions of Congress and to the US State one week after 9/11, Bush declared, “War on terror will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” This raises the question, is the war on terror over, and if so, who won? And if it continues, against whom are we fighting? For what ends? Where? And with who?

So, our panel today will help us engage with these questions, we welcome your responses and engagement. Let me first introduce the panellists and then I’ll wrap up with a little bit of housekeeping before turning over to them. First, can I welcome Miss Hina Rabbani Khar, former Foreign Minister of Foreign Affairs from Pakistan. Hina, we’re delighted to have you join us today. I’m joined also by Sir John Sawers, Senior Adviser here at Chatham House, but also former Head of the Secret Intelligence Service and with a long and – service in the UK Foreign and Diplomatic Services. Dr Meghan O’Sullivan, Professor O’Sullivan, joins us from Harvard Kennedy School, and she was a US Deputy National Security Adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan and between 2004 and 7, during the Bush administration. And last but certainly by no means least, Dr Robin Niblett, the Director of – Chair of Chatham House and a long watcher of US/European relations, including on the war on terror.

Now, this event is on the record today, it is being recorded, and you’re free to, and encourage you to, tweet it under the #CH, Chatham House, Events. If I can ask you, we’d love to have your questions, your thoughts and perspectives, please do put them in the Q&A box, and I will unmute you when it comes to the question time, or if you’d rather I read out your question, please indicate and I will do so.

Now, without further ado, I’d love to turn over to the first of our panellists, you, I’m going to ask you to start, Megan. You wrote an op-ed in April of this year opposing Biden’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and you said in that article, “This is not the end of the forever war, it’s just entering a new phase.” To what extent are we in this new phase and how has the last month in Afghanistan impacted it?

Dr Meghan O’Sullivan

Thank you, Renata, and thank you for setting the tone for our conversation, it’s really a privilege to be here with such fantastic colleagues at a very sober moment in time. I – let me – I wanted to make three points upfront, but let me begin, really, by answering your question directly, and that’s really by talking a little bit about the future. I think a lot of the rhetoric that you mentioned at the beginning about the finality of the war on terror, the desire to drive to the end, I think over the last 20 years has given way to a realism that terrorism is just a part of the fabric of the international landscape, that there will always be some element of terrorism in foreign policy, in many cases, in the domestic affairs of governments.

Today we’ve seen a morphing of the terrorist threat, that John and others can speak to better than I, but one that is really concentrated in civil wars, less so than in attacks on large developed countries, as had been feared by many people in the United States and elsewhere, going back to the 9/11 period. So, I think we’ve come to appreciate that the war on terror won’t have an endpoint, even an endpoint like President Bush described, but it is going to be, as I said, part of the landscape, and the real challenge going ahead is how can we, one, be agile enough that our institutions and our mindsets can adapt to the changing nature of terrorism?

Here in the United States, there’s a real focus now on domestic terrorism, and, in fact, you’ve had some senior officials of the Biden administration note that domestic terrorism is actually the largest threat, the largest terrorist threat, to the United States at this moment in time. So, again, I think it’s – there’s some parallels actually with the pandemic, we’re trying to grapple with this idea, how are we going to live with these surging viruses in a way that doesn’t incapacitate our way of living? I think we’ve come to appreciate that terrorism is, in fact, similar in that regard, if that’s not too inappropriate a parallel.

If I can just say a couple of things more generally, let me just make maybe two quick points, and hopefully they’ll be ones that we can explore a little further in our conversation, is, first, you know, there is something necessarily, you know, arbitrary about 20 years. But at the same time, Renata, as you suggested, it is a good moment for reflection, and I think, as an American, you know, one can’t get away from the reality that 9/11 upended American foreign policy in a really fundamental way. It’s really hard to overstate that reality.

And I – you know, and out of curiosity, or I went back and I looked at some of the election arguments and debates in 2000, before 9/11, during the – right before the election of George Bush, and Condi Rice actually has an article on foreign affairs where she argues that the US needs to prioritise its foreign policy much more sharply, and lays out the objectives that the Bush administration really came into office with before 9/11. And those have to do with military competitiveness, but really, kind of, advancing America’s economic reach, extending America’s economic influence.

And then, thirdly, very notably, she talks about the importance of focusing America’s political and foreign capital on relationships with what she calls “big powers,” Russia and China in particular. So, it’s not just an afterthought to say that in the absence of 9/11, America might have paid more attention to China. I think that really was the intention at the time, but instead, you know, we saw the last 20 years, America really absorbed – there’s so many ways we could look at it, but I tend to think, you know, about four things that absorbed a lot of America’s energy, over the last 20 years.

The first being Afghanistan, the second being Iraq, the third being a fundamental reorganisation of our military intelligence and law enforcement capacity, abroad and at home. We had the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and huge law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to go alongside that, and it spurred a similar type thing in our private sector, which often responds to the public sector. And then, lastly, of course, was the CT co-operation that became a focal point of our bilateral relationships around the world, and that was a huge emphasis. So, for all we can lament about where America spent the last 20 years, in terms of costs and lives and resources, and in reputation, I think that it is important to note that the last 20 years haven’t, at least from the perspective of the United States, been an age of terror. We did not end up having years punctuated by major terrorist attacks, which was some of the fear and even expectation of experts at the time.

The last point I’ll make, and I’ll make it very briefly, ‘cause I’m sure we’ll return to this, is just, you know, now is really a moment for us to focus sharply on what are the lessons that we take away, particularly from Iraq and Afghanistan? And it’s a little difficult to do with the freshness of Afghanistan, but I think, from the perspective of an American, there’s certainly a lot in our political debate, which leads one to be nervous about whether or not we’re taking away the right lessons. And I’ll just mention three areas that we can delve into if people would like, but I think we’re definitely, you know, taking the wrong lessons away about democracy building, taking questionable lessons away about the role of democracy promotion in our foreign policy. And then lastly, I think we’re overlearning the lesson of the importance of diplomacy and how it was squeezed out by militarisation of our foreign policy to the point where we might have unrealistic expectations about what diplomacy on its own can achieve. I’d love to talk more about each of those things, in the course of the next hour with my colleagues, so thank you.

Dr Renata Dwan

Thank you so much, and I certainly think we will be coming back to these, Meg, and I’m also struck by your reference to Condoleezza Rice, as that – what would have been the foreign policy, it would have had an economic influence focus and are managing big powers, because what I hear when I hear that is the resonance with Biden’s foreign policy priorities one might argue today. So, an interesting question that we can perhaps turn to in the discussion.

John, if I can turn to you now, and I think Meghan set it up very well, the focus on military intelligence and all intelligence apparatus, the focus on counterterrorism of the last two decades. You have been intimately involved in UK and UK alliances’ intelligence co-operation. The immense unity in the initial days after 9/11, that immense outpouring of grief from Cuba to [inaudible – 13:35] saying, “We’re all Americans,” to Russia, to China. Did that sustain and facilitate a new drive towards intern – intelligence and other forms of co-operation, and to what extent did that continue, for how long, and what are the prospects for any future co-operation in this space? We’d love to hear your opening thoughts.

Sir John Sawers

Well, thank you, Renata, and thank you for inviting me to join this distinguished panel. I think we’ve all been looking back at our memories of 9/11 and where we were, and our initial reactions to it, and we’ve been reminded by some very powerful and moving documentaries of the survivors and the active Politicians at the time, and the traumas that everyone went through as a consequence of that.

And I think Meghan has pointed out well that, at the time, we really feared that this was the new normal, that we would be having major terrorist attacks frequently. Now, we did have some. We had the Atocha station in Madrid in 2004, we had London in July 2005, we had Mumbai in 2008, and Bataclan in Paris in 2015. These were all – none of them were on the scale of 9/11, but all of them inflicting well over 100 casualties and several hundreds in the number of cases. And from an intelligence point of view, these were all terrible events, but at least ten times that number of complex, mass-casualty attacks were planned and were being executed by terrorist groups, but were disrupted by the efforts of security and intelligence services around the world, and through the co-operation between them.

And certainly, 9/11 injected a whole new momentum behind co-operation between security and intelligence services. Previously, you would share intelligence carefully with just a few very trusted partners, there was a need-to-know principle about intelligence inside the service and outside. That environment changed to one of dare-to-share, and I think the 9/11 Commission in America showed up, that frankly, had the source of intelligence co-operation and integration of counterterrorism efforts that we developed in the five to ten years after 9/11 – had that been available in 2001, 2001, 9/11 would have been thwarted, it wouldn’t have happened.

And certainly the capacity of intelligence services to keep their arms around this problem has been very substantial, and of course the Armed Forces made a huge effort and huge contribution. Basically, Al-Qaeda was dismantled in the first year or two after – Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and in the border regions of Pakistan, and then a sustained effort, led by the CIA and the Americans, but was – successfully prevented the emergence of a global reach of Al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan. You saw lots of franchises, the one in Yemen was particularly potent. You had them in the Islamic Maghreb, you had them in Somalia, and then Daesh emerged in Iraq and Syria, so there have been new developments of terrorism. But by and large, terrorist groups have been forced to adopt much more simple tactics and plans because the more complex an operation the more vulnerable it is to being penetrated by intelligence and security services.

So, whilst we still have numerous attacks, taking place, and we had a bad year here a few years ago in 2017 when we had, I think, four or five major – four or five attacks, involving serious casualties, but they were all fairly low level. So, I agree with that sense that Meghan put over, that we’re – the war on terror is moving into a new phase. I never really liked the phrase “war on terror”, but the campaign to address terrorism is moving into a new phase. The intelligence and security agencies have got literally thousands of people they have to keep their eyes on. We saw in New Zealand an attack of someone who was being actively monitored by the New Zealand Security Services, but was still able to carry out a damaging knife attack in a supermarket.

So this is an ongoing challenge, but I would say it’s not a threat to our way of life. It is not an existential challenge to Western democracy. Those have moved on, and the big priorities we face, and this, for all the, sort of, bad timing of the Biden administration decision and the incompetent execution of it, where they put the withdrawal of the military ahead of the evacuation of the civilians and then had to reverse course, the – but for all that poor execution of the decision, the priorities now are not Afghanistan, and they’re not even really terrorism.

The priorities are dealing with managing a great power relationship with China, the continuing threat from Russia, the challenge of climate change, which will produce conflict in its wake, I’m sure of that, if it hasn’t already, and issues like – longstanding issues like preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. These are the strategic challenges that we need to be focusing on, but terrorism is not going to go away, terrorism’s been with us since the 19th Century, and probably before that. I mean, Julius Caesar and Cicero were murdered back in Ancient Rome. The use of violence as a way of circumventing political methods has been with us for a very long time, and that will continue, and I think the combination of Islamic terrorism, right-wing terrorism, which we’ve seen growing, these are going to be continuing challenges.

But the demands posed by 9/11, I think the intelligence and security communities, they made some mistakes, and the CIA made a terrible mistake with its enhanced interrogation system, for example, and dragged others too closely into that mess. But overall, the strategic answer is one of comparative success, but an ongoing effort, and we’ll never get that lovely, sorry to say this to an American, but Americans love clear-cut outcomes; they like winners and losers. Well, with terrorism, we just have to stay on top and keep our arms around the problem and keep the level of terrorism down to a manageable level, and that’s the next phase of that war.

Dr Renata Dwan

Thanks. Thanks very much, John, I think there’ll be lots of interesting follow-up there on two of your comments, one that we managed to bring to a much lower level the scale of damage of threats, and while that is true, I think an interesting question to be posed is whether we’ve outsourced it to other countries, Nigerian girls in Boko Haram, villages in Somalia and Mali, and let’s talk about that when we come to the questions. And I think your question is going to be fascinating for the discussion is that what are the strategic challenges now and how do we bring lessons from the war on terror to that including how much we narrow our lens to only focus on one – a particular lens and a black and white view? But we’ll come back to that.

Hina, from a Pakistan perspective. Pakistan was and still is a victim of terrorism and you have a significant terrorist challenge on your territory, with civilians impacted every day. Pakistan has also been a base for Taliban operatives, and, indeed, the area, the location, which Osama bin Laden was apprehended and killed by American forces in 2011. From a perspective of yours as a former Foreign Minister, is the war on terror over from a Pakistan perspective and what phase are we in, if indeed we’re in a phase?

Hina Rabbani Khar

Okay, so, I’m someone who has quite a lot of exposure to Western thinking, Western thinkers, and typically find myself in rooms like this, either virtual or real time, many times, and it amazes me that I’m always appalled by the difference in lengths that we have sitting in the region as opposed to the Europeans and the Americans. And it amazes me when I hear statements like, “This was – is successful, war on terror,” I have huge problem with this nomenclature itself, because war on terror itself brought in its wake and unleashed a great deal of terror in the region in how this war was fought in the war theatre on the ground.

For somebody like me sitting in Pakistan across the border, as you know, we have 2,600 kilometre border with Afghanistan. After 9/11, what happened, we were partners with the rest of the world, we continue to be partners, we like to sel – believe ourselves to be partners with the rest of the world, unleased a terror wave in my country, and in Afghanistan, and the death toll, over in my country, for instance, was 77,000 people, 33,000 of them civilians, okay? And about 20,000 civilian, and sorry, paratroopers, meaning soldiers, and policemen.

Now, when you look at the numbers in Afghanistan, that’s also a huge number, and these I’m quoting the Brown University, you know, Watson Institute, 177,000 people altogether, about 100,000 plus civilians. This has been a costly war, not only in terms of the trillions of dollars that the United States and the rest of the world spent on it, but in terms of lives, real lives, lost. And I do not believe the – our description of terror if you mean violent groups who are able to attack has gone anywhere in this region. In fact, I think it has bred a new form of terrorist outfits, which are perhaps more dangerous than before.

I mean, I do not remember back in 2001 thinking of ISIS as a big deal, ISIS, or whatever nomenclature you decide to use for them, right? Now they are a real present threat within this region and elsewhere, so I think where we stand, or where we sit, depends on where we stand, as has been received instead – been said. And I feel that there have been both massive tactical errors to [inaudible – 24:16], how our borders were not sealed, our borders could not be sealed, and all of that flight of terrorists, if you want to call them, you know, I do call them that, whether they’re Al-Qaeda or leftovers of the Taliban, came into Pakistan, and then we were left to deal with this. And then we were told by the rest of the world, for years and years and decades, that “you are housing them,” that we were housing four million Afghan refugees, and they ought to be more.

So I don’t want to go into the – you know, into – but all I’m saying is that there were massive tactical errors, and there were also massive strategic errors. You took us back to the stated objective of President Bush, okay, and found – until each terrorist group is found, stopped or defeated, he said, right, and then there was nation building in the middle, President Obama had some changes in that object – in what the objectives of this war were.

And finally, when we see how this war ended, with the speech of President Joe Biden just a few days back, where he spent the first ten minutes celebrating the fact that 140,000 people were rescued, were airlifted, and that seemed to be the only achievement that you could give to the people, and it seemed as if it was a mission of mercy, and evangelical sort of a mission. So that shows what we went in for, and the grand objectives or the unrealistic, sort of – and I think it was also very strewn with a call for revenge rather than realistic assessment of what can be achieved. And this whole mission – and it’s very surprising to me because many of the things that we feel now and are being written about that we did wrong were areas that we, for instance, from Pakistan, were always talking about, for instance, that in [inaudible – 25:58], you know, the rem – whatever was acceptable from the Taliban should have perhaps been involved, and those things did not happen. So as I said, I think it was strategically flawed, but it was also tactically flawed, and that had a huge impact.

Now, if you would allow me just to quickly go over, you know, some of the mistakes that we are remaking, okay, because there was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American, and the Western, and the Pakistani inputs in it, and the Chinese even at that time, and the Saudis’ input in it to try and ensure that the Soviets got out. Once they did get out, there was lots of military spending that proceeded it, once they got out, we all know that Afghanistan was left high and dry, in terms of economic or humanitarian assistance, and that led us to have to come back post-9/11. Right?

I feel we are making the exact same mistake again, with 2.4 trillion plus spent on the military side of this 20-year engagement, we cannot find the hundreds of millions of dollars right now, or even before, to give the economic assistance and the humanitarian assistance that may be required. You know, and it’s interesting, this Western phenomena of wanting to airlift as many people, how many people out of 14 million can we airlift? What about the people who are left behind? And are we not supposed to concentrate on that in a very big way?

And the other lesson learned, because, you know, this whole panel discussion was supposed to be about US-European foreign policy and how it has been affected by 9/11. Again, as an onlooker, as a person who looks at the West rather than sitting in the West and looking at itself, I feel that what is happening with China in many ways is a repeat of the mistakes that we made in the past, and let me tell you how I say that, okay? Because for many, many years, as Minister for Economic Affairs for Pakistan, we were going to every door, whether it was European or American, saying, “We are starving for infrastructure funding, please fund the World Bank, please fund your bilateral resources, we need infrastructure funding.”

It was always we have too many, and which is fair, you have – but then the Chinese come in with this, you know, Belt and Road initiative and particularly CPEC, and the whole world rushes to blame and claim that the Chinese have intentions, which are not very good, right? In the same way, I think what we have done in Afghanistan left this big vacuum, this void, which then may be filled with China, and China has, I believe, good legitimate interest for having a stable region, right, because this region affects all of us, you know, whoever is in the regions, their economic, political wellbeing. And now, when this void is – will not be filled by the West and China perhaps comes in to fill it, we will again be left with the, you know, designs of China, which are not very, sort of, you know, res – appreciated by the West.

My last point on this is that I believe a lot of the US and European foreign policy problems right now are emanating from this huge fear, almost an unrealistic fear, of China, of the emergence of China. And whereas in the 1990s and early 2000s for a long time, the intention was to engage with those who we feared, whether it was Iran or China, or anyone else, the new rule is that we try and ensure that those who we fear in terms of great power competition, or whatever you want to call it, are taken outside of the centre of the world, and the void, and countries like Pakistan, are asked to choose, is it them or is it us? I think that’s a very dangerous trend, and US has – the power that the US has, the real power that the US has, is its democracy, is its humanitarian track record, which obviously was not there in Afghanistan, it’s its values.

Now those are what gives US the soft power, and I believe also the hard power to fight with. In fact, we are going back and wanting to fight with military power, which I think is, you know, in my view, a mistake that the West is making right now.

Dr Renata Dwan

Thank you very much, Hina, for not just offering a perspective from Pakistan and from a non-US Europe perspective, but also offering some thoughts on the future and where US-European perspectives are increasingly focused in your view, which brings us very nicely to Robin. And Robin, you’ve worked in the US, you’ve worked in the UK, you’ve lived and worked in Europe. How have the nuances between the different countries in response to 9/11, in response to the years following, in response to the war on terror, grown, diminished, led to different points of emphasis? Share – walk us through that, because I think, in the same way that Hina says it’s important not to have a blanket the other, it’s also important not to have a blanket US-Europe as one, particularly in this moment in time.

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

Thanks very much, Renata, and I’m delighted, as are you, to have such a great panel with us today bringing these very different perspectives and experiences to what I think both you and Meghan said, and everyone has said, is also a very solemn anniversary for not only the United States, many, many European, many Brits died, as well, in the attacks on 9/11, and obviously John listed the sequence that came after it.

It was a – I think it’s just worth noting, as I was a European in Washington those days at CSIS, I was their number two, I remember my boss, John Hamre, was in upstate New York on 9/11, on the day itself, and we, you know, had a, kind of, staff meeting going on. And I don’t need to go through the whole business from thereon, but the utter shock and almost disbelief as to what was happening in the United States, despite those in intelligence services knowing what had been signalled by the previous attempt actually to bomb the Twin Towers that had taken place, I can’t remember now, four/five years beforehand. But the absolute shock that what had happened had happened, and this sense of being a – under assault from outside, that America was under attack from outside, and the, kind of, psychological impact, it struck me, it was having on those in government and those around it.

I would add quickly, don’t forget, there was the anthrax attacks took place literally one week later, and added to this sense of being besieged, I remember at that point, we’d done a simulation in June of 2001 of what a smallpox attack could look like on the United States, not a very positive thing to do. But in September, if I remember rightly, it was within a month or two of 9/11, we had to give a private briefing to Dick Cheney office, this sense that somehow the next thing was coming, that it could be WMD, you know, I just don’t think, as Europeans, we could appreciate, unless you were, kind of, there, that sense of shock, and I’m sure Meghan can talk to this, as well, later.

And it did change completely, it struck me, the focus for the George W. Bush administration, you know, Meghan’s given a very good example from the Condi Rice [inaudible – 33:25] in foreign affairs. But it did change that balance to what was described as the – kind of, the neocon agenda, and there were some people, when you go into American administration, where you can come in and pursue an agenda, if you’re in the right position within it, and can get support around the Presidency, and so on. And there were some who really did want to remake the Middle East, and went about doing that.

And I thought it was fascinating to me was to see the extent to which the Europeans were so in the mix on wanting to be supportive of the US, as John noted before, invoked Article 5 of the NATO Treaty themselves, to try and provide that air – cover and air support into the US, supported the move into Afghanistan, which was taken actually with real deliberation, it struck me, it wasn’t a sudden – despite some of the language, a sudden push.

Europeans are very alive to the fact that a lot of the 9/11 plot was conducted in Europe. Mohamed Atta being based in Hamburg for a long time, some of the planning was done in Spain. Those networks actually, in many cases, were sitting in Europe, and then, you know, took the flight over to the United States. So, there was, I think, a deep awareness of this, which why it was so disappointing, sad, to see that actually the war on terror became the source of one of the deepest rifts in the transatlantic relationship, and we keep talking about them beyond this, but the split that happened as the move went from Afghanistan to Iraq.

We’ve got to remember the terminology that I think it was Donald Rumsfeld came up with of New Europe and Old Europe, and Tony Blair, and Portugal, and Notis Marias now are part of the new Europe, as were some central East European countries who wanted to be – have that American support, but that division was shocking, and why was it there?

And I think this takes us right through to whether there’s been a change today or not. For most Europeans, you know, terrorism was local, domestic, it had happened for years. I mean, John goes back to Rome, but you could simply go from Baader-Meinhof, ETA, IRA, Red Brigades. You know, the idea that you would do a war on terrorism, when terrorism was, in essence, something domestic for most Europeans that you had to manage domestically, was just completely counterintuitive. The idea that you could have a military solution, that by calling it a global war on terror you were actually turning it into military conflict, with a combatants or soldiers as opposed to being terrorists or criminals.

And Ken McCallum, the Head of MI5, was describing this morning on the BBC Radio 4, you know, and I’m sure he was being cautious about his language, as well, that many Europeans did not want to call this a war. They want to treat this as a civil activity, take them to court, do not give them the credence. And I think for me, in the end, it was a lot about legitimacy, in a way to win, to defeat terrorism in Europe, you needed the legitimacies as a government ‘cause it was a domestic process. But in the US, you’re going out at the least in that period, 2001 to whatever, four or five, and it did turn a lot in the second Bush administration, it was a, kind of, change of approach that Meghan again, kind of, talked about when she went into the administration fully.

I think that Europeans really were deeply divided on America, and Tony Blair was trying to straddle those two instincts of wanting to stand by America, and I think he has and has continued to defend the idea of this being a war on terror to most Europeans who felt that was not the right thing, and Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, renditions, were all examples of what was wrong, from the European perspective, and it really made it incredibly difficult to hold the alliance together. Even the attacks at [inaudible – 37:25], which threw the Spanish election, on the eve of the Spanish election, I ended up having to give evidence to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on this issue, rather than driving people in the direction of wanting to stand by the US, Aznar was overthrown, Zapatero anti-war came in immediately. And for many Spaniards, and I spent a lot of time in Spain, it was this idea that they had backed, in essence, the war in Afghanistan, they were now looking at this war in Iraq, and yet look what had happened. Actually, it had ended up bringing the war onto their own territory, so it really created some visceral stuff.

Just to close, ‘cause I don’t want to go on too long, we’ll talk more about the future, I think the key question is whether we are now in the same space or whether those divides still continue. To talk about maybe later on, I think this shift to domestic terrorism in the US means that we’re now – alongside international terrorism means that we’re more aligned. I think this understanding – you know, the fact that IS has emerged from Al-Qaeda and that it is posing as much of a similar threat in Europe as it is to the United States means we’re much more aligned, there is, I think, a much more common approach to think about this than this was before. But a lot of that common approach is because America does not want to go over there to fix things, and they’re more European in their approach now than they were before, so I’ll stop there.

Dr Renata Dwan

I think that’s always an interesting way to stop off, that the Americans have become more European and we can interrogate that question. But I think thank you so much to you all. I’d like to put out a question to perhaps all of you to start off, but I’ll start with you, Meghan, ‘cause you really raised this in your opening remarks. The democracy promotion part of the agenda of the 9/11 moment, if we avoid the war on terror, but the consequences of 9/11 and the focus on democracy promotion. One of the things that Robin has highlighted is the contradiction between that of greater repression of home, including surveillance, including more stricter security measures, and yet a greater commitment to a democracy promotion agenda. From your perspective as somebody who was in the Bush administration in those years, was this very much a part of a successful effort to a war on terror or was it part of a broader global agenda at the time that simply the war on terror enabled and facilitated and built on? So, to what extent was democracy promotion seen as integral to tackling terror?

Dr Meghan O’Sullivan

Thanks, Renata, and I just want to say how much I appreciate all the comments of my colleagues, there’s a lot of richness in this discussion, and I wish we were going to be able to speak for longer than we are, but I’m sure the conversations will continue.

To get to your question, I would say there’s a couple of ways to come at it. The first is on the question was it integral? And I think someone alluded to – I think it was Robin who alluded to the new conservative outlook that became more central in the early part of the Bush administration, and I think a key component of that outlook is that we need to focus on what happens inside of countries, as well as focusing on their external behaviour. I think that’s actually a component of neoconservatism as a political school of thought, is actually the internal workings of a country actually impact their external workings.

And that was really underscored by 9/11 and I think that’s one of the big intellectual takeaways that the Bush administration took in the early years, after 9/11, was that the somewhat convenient bargain that the United States would – had with some of the countries around the world, “We’re going to not really probe into what’s happening inside your borders. We’re basically going to focus on our relationship, be it an economic one, having to do with oil, or other external manifestations, and you can do what you want inside your borders.” I think that was really blown out of the water by 9/11, and it really resulted in a major rethinking on the part of the Bush administration about how what happens inside of countries suddenly is a direct concern to the United States because security problems arise out of perhaps conditions of repression or lack of liberties in other countries. So, I think in that respect, the democratisation piece did become tied into it.

I think there’s a more tangible angle to look at, and that is how much was democracy promotion in Iraq and Afghanistan seen as integral to those efforts? And there I think it’s a little bit more complicated. As Robin alluded, there certainly were people in the Bush administration who did see an opportunity to try to remake the Middle East, and there’s no question that there were people in the administration at pretty senior levels who were interested in Iraq, not only because of the threats that it was perceived to hold regarding WMD, but because of the potential opportunity that was there if Iraq were to become a democracy, the impact that that would have on the region.

I would say just a couple of things about that, I mean, there’s so many angles to this, but the first thing I would say is I firmly believe, and I imagine I’ll be at odds with many of our viewers, that that was not the ultimate reason the US went in. I do not think that is – you know, that, kind of, put the argument over the edge. I think at the end of the day, having discussed this – I wasn’t actually in the administration yet on 9/11, but having discussed this with President Bush, on many occasions, it’s hard for me to imagine that Iraq would have happened, Iraq different than Afghanistan, in the absence of information that at the time was believed to be true, having to do with WMD. So the democratisation piece I think was real, but it wasn’t actually the real impetus for these interventions.

If I could end on a personal note or two things that I reflect on often. I spent a total of two years living in Iraq during this time period, and I often think that people on the outside overstate the push of American or Western democracy onto the Iraqis, and they underappreciate the pull. You know, one of the things I remember most in the early years being in Iraq, working with Iraqis every day, and John was there for much of the time that I was there, as well, was how much the Iraqis wanted democracy, how much they – we spent so much time trying to find alternatives to elections to try to dissuade them to delay elections, and, again, not that elections are democracy, but there was a real desire.

One of the first jobs I had in Iraq was to go around, I went to 15 of 18 provinces in Iraq and talked to Iraqis about what kind of political system they wanted next. I mean, the conversation took a number of different angles, but the answer that I got from every single person I spoke to was some variant of, “We want an accountable government. We want” – and that wasn’t the language of democracy, but accountability is actually key to democracy. So there’s a very strong pull for democracy in some of these places, maybe not as we envisioned it, but certainly a strong pull that I think is easily discounted.

And then lastly, I would say I became a real advocate or advocate is the wrong word, I truly believed in the efforts that we were making to try to help Afghans and Iraqis build more representative institutions, because it became clear to me, from being engaged in those countries, that there were really, kind of, two ways that these countries could be secure, stable, and hopefully eventually prosperous. And that was either, you know, they could be governed by an authoritarian, maybe a benign one, but, you know, one that could keep that very fractured country together where a lot of different groups, a lot of different interests, or, two, you could have a democratic system that sought to balance the rights of minorities and that sought to, you know, translate the competing competition for power and resources into a democratic framework where there was an effort to try to balance all these competing agendas. And to me that’s where democracy became very important in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, is just a viable system to manage a very diverse and fractured country.

Sorry for just touching…

Dr Renata Dwan

Thanks for that.

Dr Meghan O’Sullivan

…on the edge of the iceberg, but I’m sure my colleagues will pick up on that.

Dr Renata Dwan

No, thanks, Meghan, and I’m interested in your statements, you know, your experience from Iraq, because if I think about my experience from Afghanistan, and to Hina’s point about the sins of the Bonn Agreement that led to the constitution of Afghanistan of 2004, the pull factor, the desire for thousands of Afghans to have a strong central government that they thought could help overcome the divisions of decades of conflict, was an Afghan aspiration or an aspiration of many in Afghanistan then, and I think that’s an important reminder.

John, you were in Kosovo, and you were in Iraq, as Meghan suggested. The state-building agenda, the agenda that we came with of the remaking of states, the elections that we mentioned, the arrangements, the institutions, the security sector reform, all those components that were part of the state-building agenda, to what extent do you think that was linked clearly to a strategy on navigating threats from terror, or to what extent was it building on what had been some fairly successful interventions? We saw Balkans, Bosnia and Kosovo, we saw Sierra Leone, and in particular UK, we saw Timor-Leste that was ongoing as we spoke then, Australian, UN actions, you know, to what extent would that state-building agenda and that state-building moment that was out there shaped the interventions and the thinking and the policymaking around Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade?

Sir John Sawers

Well, I would take a step back, first of all, to say that Western countries came to the view about 50 or 60 years ago that actually, raising the quality of life to develop economies, to see governments becoming more effective, became part of the perspective, part of our foreign policy, we developed the concept of development assistance, and we have agencies like the World Bank and the IMF and different ways to promote that economic assistance. And one of the lessons that development agencies learnt, over the first decades of that, was that unless you had a basis of security in a country, you couldn’t build development. And so providing for security institutions, for some accountability of those security services and Armed Forces, was an important part, but having their capability there, as well, so they could deal with genuine security threats, was an important part of the whole development agenda.

And I think that the understanding of terrorism, it wasn’t just that these were evil people out to kill others, they had a political agenda, as Fareed Zakaria reminds us in today’s Washington Post. Their main goal was in the Islamic world, and Hina has very persuasively told us about the impact of this terrorist attacks in places like Pakistan, and I saw it myself in Egypt and elsewhere. But part of the problem, and I’m not referring to Pakistan here, but part of the problem in the Arab world is that part of the motivation of the terrorist groups, and they were – Al-Qaeda was essentially an Arab group, was that they had no political means to express themselves in countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and in the republics like Syria and Iraq and Libya.

So, there was a connection between the rise of terrorism and the lack of governmental development in these countries, and I think that was something that the Bush administration recognised. It wasn’t just a campaign to extend some Israeli values or whatever across the Arab world. It was genuinely wanting to see Arab human development, Arab governance, Arab economies, evolve in a way which carried the consent and support of the Arab people. And I think that’s been a – that is a – an im – that was an important part of the agenda. It wasn’t just a way of legitimising interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was seen as a way of trying to stabilise those countries. And as we look at Iraq, and I don’t want to dwell too long on Iraq, but here we are 18 years later, and I think Iraq is moving away from sectarian politics.

In the early years, the elections were fought within the sectarian communities, but now you’re seeing groups with appeal across the sectarian divide. You’re seeing in places like Morocco that move towards a more open and pluralistic system, as their response to the Arab Spring some ten years ago, they’ve had elections. The immediate response to the Arab Spring, in some places repression, in Morocco it was to open up a bit, and an Islamist political party gained the majority in Parliament for ten years and ran the government, and they’ve just, earlier this week, been defeated in an electoral process.

Now, these changes, these moves towards more open societies, is – are welcome, and actually the reversal of it, partly to supress moderate Islamist parties like Ennahda in Tunisia, they’re a bad, restros – retrograde step that some secular forces are taking to supress the development of more open and pluralistic systems in the Arab world. So I do think the – that – I should be interested in what Hina has to say on this issue. But I do think that developing more open political systems is an integral part of building a more developed society, both economically and culturally and politically, and provides that level of consent, which means that terrorist groups are less likely, other violent groups are less likely, to gain cohesion and gain traction in those societies.

Dr Renata Dwan

Thanks, John, and, Hina, not to turn immediately to you, but I’ll turn immediately to you. Building on what John said, what we see in Afghanistan right now are women on the streets protesting against Taliban. We see pictures of Journalists, we see the bravery of Journalists, of Afghan Journalists following, and we see the stories of men and women who’ve developed lives, hopes, dreams, for education, for engagement, for – everyone uses Facebook, as you know, in Pakistan, too, a huge amount. To what extent do you think that the prospects for Taliban engagement, despite the rhetoric we’ve seen, the first announcement of the interim authority, what is very far from their initial comments, that they will engage, what – to what extent do you see the prospect for those expressions of popular will for expression, for freedoms, for democracy, for choice, to be tolerated or to be enabled, and what can Pakis – Afghanistan’s neighbours do to support that, including Pakistan?

Hina Rabbani Khar

Yeah. Okay, so this is, as you can imagine, a million-dollar question, right, and I think anyone who feels they have the answer to that question is naïve enough not to know what – how complex the realities on the ground is, right? I’m just going to take it from the question that you posed to Meghan and, you know, come to this particular answer because I think both are related. So the question was that is the democracy promotion agenda, and John, of course, referred to it also, that it is actually because of good intentions that there is a democracy promotion agenda because that, once you give people the quality of life, human rights, the right to work, the right to choose, these are all great values, okay?

And in many ways, these are values or systems that dev – in developing countries like Pakistan, we reached post-partition, went, you know, through our moments of dictatorships, etc. But in India, for instance, you have had a consistent – you know, that is also going South now, but – or becoming unsecular, but some form of democracy or the other. Now, my – I feel very strongly that it’s extremely important for us, as the general international community, to call a spade a spade, to call the mistakes mistakes, so that we at least do not repeat the same mistakes again, right?

Now, on the democracy agenda, if it was universal, if the US and many European countries were universally projecting, promoting that agenda with all of its allies and were wishing the same for many other Middle Eastern countries, that they were wishing for other countries in which they’ve had military interventions, I would say fair and square, right? But it is very selective, this agenda has been very selective in its implementation in certain countries and not in others.

Now, my view is, and I think I have Pakistani experience to go back to, that when this is superimposed on a natural country, which is evolving towards some sort of development and some sort of, you know, rights or democratic processes, when a Western-imposed agenda of the typical, you know, centralised democracy, you know, architecture is imposed, it eventually takes you back further years in the long run rather than forward, okay? So it was rather rich, and it’s interesting for me to listen to President Biden saying, “I’m not going to send my boys to protect women in Afghanistan,” right? Where the US had been telling for the last 20 years to the whole world that it was to protect women.

Now, within Afghanistan, let’s come back to directly answering your question, what are the prospects? Personally, this is not Pakistan’s view, personally, I do not think the prospects are very flowery. I am currently not very, very optimistic. I was very optimistic when the first line started coming in from, you know, the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan or whatever you may want to call it, that they will be different, that they will be inclusive, that they will – women will be allowed to be – you know, to be part of, sort of, normal daily life and the right to education, the right to economic wellbeing, the right to economic activity.

Now, what we’re seeing is obviously slightly different. The – in my view, this is not the most inclusive government at all. I think we are repeating the mistake of Bonn, one, okay, where you had a chance, and by now we know that, for instance, the DG ISI, ex-DG ISI Pakistan has said that he rushed to – in 2001, rushed to the US, together with the Saudi Foreign Minister, saying – begging the Americans, really, to try and make it more inclusive.

We lost that moment, and therefore, in the 20 years that this war has played out in Afghanistan, I’m – the losers and the winners have been very varied, and it is so difficult to oversimplify this as in the women for – of Kabul or are you talking about the rule of women, right? Because we all know now, and it has been chronicled and there are many, many writeups available, research papers available, as to the way this war was fought on the ground left much to be desired. And it wasn’t America projecting its best ways in the choices that it made, in the warlords that it shows, in the anarchy that was happening in many parts of the rural Afghanistan, right?

So there is the urban Afghanistan, which feels let down, left down, which has been told that they have all these rights, which they have a right to have, and I feel full empathy for them. But eventually, you know, allow me to say this, eventually, what we all as regional players, as Pakistan, or as non-regional players, and as superpowers such as the United States, or as important players, such as the UK, what we all need to understand is that eventually, we have to try and somehow encourage a real inclusive intra Afghan dialogue. It is really for the Afghans to be able to sit it out and fight it out amongst themselves as to how will they reach these new realities? You know, what the aspirations of the women in Kabul are versus perhaps the aspirations of the women in the rural areas who perhaps feel – and I do want to say this because I think this is an important fact because I’m reading a lot of Western literature. On this table, equilibrium that had been reached in the past four years, because no US soldiers were dying.

Well, again, I take you back to the Watson Institute’s report. In the last three years of US presence in Afghanistan, and I’m talking 2020/19 and 18, more Afghan civilians died of airstrikes than I believe any time before, right? So it’s about which lives are we looking at, where is the camera screen, or where is the camera – where are our screens taking us?

Dr Renata Dwan

I’m going to come in, if I may, Hina, there and I apologise for interrupting you, but it’s – I want us to move on to a question, which is underlying your critique, which is the military tactics and the prosecution of efforts to navigate through terrorist threats. You, Hina, have talked about the wrong military tactics used in Afghanistan, and I think there was a very visual image, for me at least, in one of the final acts of the US in withdrawing from Afghanistan, was a drone stroke on a bombmaker, and in so doing, the collateral damage, a terrible phrase, but in so doing, an Afghan family of nine/ten people being killed by the expl – the detonation of that ISIS – the ISK attackers’ arms. So I think it encapsulated, I think, the experience of many Afghans, understanding of what an American presence meant in their country, i.e., these explosions, faceless attacks, and I think that’s something that you were talking about, that implication, and that erosion of support for an agenda.

Meghan, you talked about the lesson that perhaps we don’t need to put so much or we wish to be careful about putting so much emphasis on diplomacy, so I think I’d love to hear your views on, well, what then looks like the appropriate military strategy?

And, John, you talked, and Robin, the importance of this more nuanced approach, the intelligence co-operation, you talked about the criminal approach, Robin, the legal frameworks and the engagements. So it’s a big question to all of you, what are the military strategies for prosecuting the future international threats that we face today? And then I’m going to open to the floor for questions. You don’t all have to take this, but I will throw it open to you maybe first, Meghan, I don’t know if you want to take a stab at it, Robin, and then anyone who wishes to join in.

Dr Meghan O’Sullivan

Thank you, and I will be brief, in the interest of hearing from my colleagues, as well. I am – you know, first, I would say I agree with Hina, there are many strategic and tactical errors that were made over the last 20 years, and I certainly wouldn’t want to leave her with the impression that that is – that I think anything besides that. But I’d like to just think about the future and your question about what the – the future of counterterrorism strategy looks like and the role of military action in it. And the reason I said that we are in danger of, kind of, overlearning the lesson of the dangers of militarising our foreign policy really has to do with one of the ways in which the Biden administration explained the withdrawal from Afghanistan to Americans. They said, you know, “We’re going to focus on the diplomatic component of it, we’re really going to reemphasise that, we’re going to be heavily engaged diplomatically.”

And I think what has already been very obvious to a lot of people is that it is very hard to sustain an active diplomatic presence, when there isn’t security on the ground, and that our military posture there, as minimal as it was compared to what it had been during the surge, and keep in mind, you know, ten years earlier, the surge in Afghanistan, there were 140,000 coalition troops that actually were engaged in direct combat, to a point where earlier this year, the US had about 3,000 troops in Afghanistan who were largely not engaged in direct combat or in support of Afghan forces.

So, you know, I would say going forward, in Afghanistan, we had the option, which I actually think was the result of learning a lot of lessons over the last 20 years, we had the option to do what I think has actually worked in many parts of the world. I didn’t look at this as a forever war, but I actually looked at it as one of the places where we had learned how we could have a relatively small presence, in support of a much larger indigenous effort. And that that was more sustainable and that could have helped us, obviously not eliminate, but minimise some of the real downsides of a military presence that would – is now what we’re looking at because we’re looking at America not backing away from counterterrorism objectives in Afghanistan, but trying to execute those objectives from a distance.

And I think that is going to be much more problematic when we think about things such as the casualties that you mentioned, Renata, the drone strikes, not having intelligence on the ground, not having close partnerships with indigenous forces on the ground, is going to mean that our counterterrorism approach is going to be much more clumsy, is going to be probably less effective, and I think it’s going to carry with it even more of some of the baggage that we’ve seen, from the time that we were on the ground.

Dr Renata Dwan

Thanks, Meghan. Robin, I’m just going to bring you in here, and then I’ll open up the questions, many of them are directed at John, but from a European perspective, what are the military perspectives?

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

Look, I just think the big question is what is effective? To Meghan’s point right here. We know what we’d like to be effective with. We know that there is a demand, as she rightly said, by many, many people, for more accountable government. I am not a specialist in this area. My observation of Afghanistan is whether it was 140,000 troops or 3,000 troops, Afghanistan, under American coalition tutelage, was not – was going to take a very long time to get to the right place. The levels of corruption that existed in the country almost manifested then, okay, not literally, just by the speed of the American pull-out. But the fact that the institutions that were emerging under American coalition tutelage was so weak strike me as having been revealed, and I’m just worried that we cannot fix it.

We may want to fix it, and there may be people in the country who want their country fixed, but I’m more on Hina’s side of this, this stuff has to evolve organically internally. You can nudge, you can push from the outside, which means therefore, to be quick, to your question, Renata, what is the military scope? The military scope then I’m afraid will be blunt and occasional, and it’ll be – if there is credible perception of a terrorist attack being prepared, whether it’s in Libya or Yemen or Afghanistan or wherever, or some perceived to be ungoverned space, and of course this has drifted over to Pakistan, as Hina often reminds us, you know, governments will feel that if they have the duty to protect their citizens, and they think they’ve got the best intelligence they can, they will take it.

And we’ve seen Americans and Europeans in a way agree on that strategy in the counter ISIS campaigns that were carried out in Syria and Iraq. Again, messy, not great in their outcomes, you know, Assad is still in power, and the situation in Iraq remains very unpredictable, although I share some of John’s very, very, very cautious optimism, or positive signs. But in the end, I think we’re going to be offshore, not in there, and actually putting troops in to help create the situation, which you can drive the diplomatic outcome strikes me, unfortunately, to be a failed strategy.

Dr Renata Dwan

Thanks, Robin, and on that rather sober thought, I’m going to move to maybe questions and intelligence because, John, many of the questions coming in from our listeners are tackling the questions of intelligence co-operation. In the interests of time, I’m going to take the liberty of reading some of them out, but maybe take the first from Callum Wilson. The question of whether the fall of Afghanistan will embolden domestic terrorists, and we have seen the issue of persons or groups slipping through the net and committing attacks on the scale perhaps if not of 9/11 then 7/7, obviously referring to the attack in the London suicide bombing. What are the feasibility, what are the options for co-operative action to lower the chances of such attacks? And maybe building on this, a question that Claudia Hamil raised, “Does Brexit lower the possibility of co-operation on such threats?” So I’ll start there with you, if I may, John.

Sir John Sawers

Yeah, thank you. I do think there is a risk that the Taliban’s success does inspire jihadists in the West, and we don’t yet know what the background in New Zealand was for that particular attack, but it looks as though, it wasn’t a coincidence that it came just a few days after the Taliban took over Kabul. I mean, the Taliban’s ideology is fairly close to that of the Al-Qaeda. Like Hina, I’m not very optimistic about the outlook in Afghanistan, particularly for – as a way of life that has evolved in Afghan cities over the last 20 years, the role of women and so on.

And there is some connectivity of communication and websites and so on, and inspiration between these various groups. So there’s no doubt that there are the terrorist threat in – around the world has gone up a notch, partly because the environment in Afghanistan will be a bit more benign for terrorist groups to operate out of there and to gather there. And secondly because this seems like a success for their mission, which they’ll want to drive forward, and other surges in terrorism in Western countries have been driven more by Iraq and Syria and so on. For whatever reason, it was a sense that Muslims were under the cosh there, and one can argue the merit of that, but there was definitely a link between events in those two countries and the rise of the terrorist threat in the West, and I think the – that it will go up a notch.

I don’t think co-operation between countries on counterterrorism has been affected by Brexit particularly. Obviously, the climate of co-operation between Britain and its European partners is more difficult when there’s a sense on both sides that they’re trying to take advantage of one another. I think this will ease over time, but it’s very striking, I think, how the professionalism of the intelligence and security services is a phenomena across the world.

We have disagreements with many countries, but I work very closely, for example, with the security service in Saudi Arabia, with the intelligence service in Turkey, in Pakistan, in Mexico, and Colombia, and many countries around the world where we – where the political relationship may not be very strong, we may actually be antagonistic towards them, in some ways, but the intelligence partnership was close. It wasn’t always as productive as we’d like it to be, and my colleagues in the ISI will perhaps recognise this, but there was – nonetheless, there was a willingness to co-operate there, and I think that will continue.

And just one final reflection on the point that Meghan and Robin were saying, the trouble is, when you engage the military in a complex multidimensional effort, they take over. When you’ve got the troops on the ground, nothing matters except the interests and the views of those troops. When Meghan and I were in Afghanistan – sorry, when Meghan and I were in Iraq, the only department we really reported to was the Pentagon, and so that’s the first problem.

The second problem is when you have foreign troops in a country, they become a target. People resent having foreign troops on the ground, and so the only really role for foreign troops is either a quick in and out military operation, which has some degree of consent in that country, or it’s building capability. I mean, I think there’s a lot here, and what the French are doing in parts of the Sahel, what Britain has done in other parts of Africa, and what the Americans are doing quite widely, of building capability through training and – both in our own countries and in the target countries, I think is an important part of the role that military can play.

But I do think one of the lessons, in the last 20 years is, you know, whether you go in full guns blazing like in Iraq, or you do it half-heartedly from the air, as in Libya, if you stand off and don’t really get involved at all, as in Syria, you can still – all these cases bring problems with them. And it has to be, as Hina says, that you build consent within a country and Western forces can play a role in supporting that process, but I don’t think it’s that – I don’t think we will see, not in our lifetimes anyway, a repeat of the sort of interventionist policies that we’ve seen over the last 20 years.

Hina Rabbani Khar

And, Renata, may I add?

Dr Renata Dwan

Yeah, very briefly, if you can, Hina.

Hina Rabbani Khar

It’s going to be very, very brief, because I just want to lead the thought as being on the receiving end of CT, counterterrorism operations from other countries, from third countries, I just want to leave two thoughts. One, the analysis on the collateral damage that such activities cause, sometimes creates bigger monsters than the one that we went to get in the first place, thought number two, and thought number two, very quickly. What are our views on the legality or the lack thereof within the international law realm is exceptionally important because when we talk about universal values, when we talk about international law and propagators, promoters of that, we cannot then put it in the bin when it doesn’t suit our cause. So I think these are two fundamentally important questions to consider.

Dr Renata Dwan

Absolutely, and I’m going to ask you all this question just building on these final comments, and I’ll start with you, Robin. In terms of prospects for the way forward, I hear a coherence in all of the remarks you were saying about the limitations of military power and the risks of the overwhelming nature of the military soaking up. I hear you all talking about the importance of targeted nuanced approaches that reflect local realities, and I hear you all talking about political limits awareness. What we didn’t talk about was strategic patience and duration, but I think that’s inherent in all your comments. But if we look forward at that, and at where we are right now in a fairly turbulent age, and a degree of frisson, and perhaps not long-lasting of tensions between the allies and between large powers, China-US rivalry. To what extent do we have any prospect that there actually will be more targeted nuanced strategies engaging with locals? I want to put that out there to you because you were all prescribing it, but to what extent is that realistic against this global international order challenge of strategic rivalry? Robin, to you.

Dr Robin Niblett CMG

Simple answer is that I think that there’s potential for us to conduct the nuanced strategies you’ve been describing in our neighbourhoods where we have commitment and interest. It’s interesting that John described the Sahel. I think as Europeans, we need to focus on North Africa, Eastern Mediterranean, but we’re probably going to end up being punitive, if I can call it that way, to things that are further away, especially when there are interconnections with our diasporas and our domestic populations. And, you know, whether we’re going to get involved in moral liberation front in the Philippines and so on, again, you know, to the extent that intelligence is keeping track of connectivity, that’s it, but I think it’s very much more about a regional strategy.

What worries me here is that co-operation beyond the transatlantic could take us to difficult spaces. What I’ve been struck by, over these last 20 years, is the difficulty that we all have, but actually governments have had, to distinguish between international terrorism and domestic terrorism, and then between domestic terrorism and insurgencies or rebellions, you know? Are you targeting civilians to cause terror, to achieve your political goal, or actually are you trying to fight the soldiers of the government?

And we’re in this danger where the word ‘terrorism’ has been completely debased. You know, President Erdoğan talks about folks who put the prices up in the markets as food terrorists, and he’s only halfway there on the kind of things he wants to do to them. But terrorism has become this catchall where China has its terrorists, Russia has its terrorists, and I feel we’ve contributed, unfortunately, to this lack of nuance in our understanding of what is going on inside the countries, so back to that key point that Meghan was saying earlier about the importance of understanding inside countries, but making sure we do not get wrapped up in our future forms of co-operation, with each enabling each person to describe whoever they want as a terrorist. I think it’s going to take us to a very, very dangerous place.

Dr Renata Dwan

I would love to continue this conversation, and I’m going to give you a final one word, John, but let me just note, to build on Robin’s, in two decades of international discussion and war on terror, we didn’t reach a definition on terror that could be agreed by states. John, last word.

Sir John Sawers

Well, thank you, and just to say that I think there’s – as we recover from COVID, as we try to get our societies back together and the – all the divisions that we face, the – especially in America and in Britain, the capacity for nuanced approaches, as you describe, I think is less. Now, I’m not hopeless about the Biden administration, I think there are some very capable people in it who are really thinking very seriously about a nuanced strategy towards China, and how to manage and the relationship with Russia, how to build alliances, and so on. But the capacity around Europe and actually the political capability of America to do this, I think is actually less than it was 20 years ago, so I’m not that optimistic.

Dr Renata Dwan

I would love us to be able to continue this discussion, and I apologise to all our listeners that – whose questions I didn’t get to, but it’s proof of the depths of richness of the panel that there were great comments, great discussions, great points raised. Let me just say that this is very much to be continued, you – here at Chatham House, we will be continuing coverage of Afghanistan-related events throughout the fall, and very much thinking about the questions that you were raising about can we take lessons from the mistakes, as well as the successes, when we think about the future challenges, including, as you suggested, Hina, in how we think about strategic rivalry between powers?

For the moment, all I can say is to those of our panellists, thank you so much for joining us, to those of you marking 9/11, our thoughts are with all of those who’s been involved in that pain and grief, and I can only say for Afghanistan, our thoughts with all our Afghan colleagues, friends, and people around the world. Thank you so much for joining us, and have a great weekend. Goodbye.