AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

DEFEATING THE ISLAMIST EXTREMISTS: A GLOBAL STRATEGY FOR COMBATING AL QAEDA AND THE ISLAMIC STATE

OPENING DISCUSSION: GENERAL MICHAEL T. FLYNN, US ARMY (RET.); FREDERICK W. KAGAN, AEI

PANELISTS: MARY HABECK, AEI; SETH JONES, RAND CORPORATION; KATHERINE ZIMMERMAN, AEI

MODERATOR: FREDERICK W. KAGAN, AEI

2:30 PM – 4:30 PM MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2015

EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/defeating-the-islamist-extremists-a- global-strategy-for-combating-al-qaeda-and-the-islamic-state/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM

FREDERICK KAGAN: Live from Washington, it’s not Saturday night. Good afternoon everyone. That’s probably the extent of the levity we’ll have this afternoon talking about the topic that faces us. Thank you all very much for coming.

Obviously, a very difficult time. We’ve been able to say that, I think, a lot over the last few months and I’m afraid that in the circumstances we’re probably going to be having to say that for quite some time.

We are here today to talk about the state of the war with al Qaeda and ISIS globally. We had the president articulate his take on that, I suppose, last night, but I think a lot of people are understandably confused about what is actually going on and, more to the point – what should be done. I think it is not as hard to understand what’s actually going on as is being made out, but it is very difficult, I think, to figure out what to do.

We have a report that we’re releasing today that is an attempt to get after that. And we will talk about that some more in a little bit. But first, I have the great pleasure to introduce our first guest today, General – Lieutenant General Retired Mike Flynn, who’s last assignment in government was as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. I had the privilege of meeting General Flynn in Afghanistan, in 2009, I believe, when he was the head of intelligence there working with General Stan McChrystal. And I have been continually impressed by a lot of things about General Flynn ever since then. And I think he really epitomizes a lot that is best in our intelligence community, in our military and our government service.

He wrote an article that was rather controversial at the time and I supposed remains so, on how to fix intelligence, which focused on the importance and value of using open source intelligence, among other things, a topic that is very dear to our hearts here at the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, where we fancy ourselves an open source intelligence organization of a sort. But he also focused heavily on the importance of understanding the cultures of the societies that one is operating amongst, which is so clearly vital to any hope of understanding the kinds of problems that we face in coming up with solutions.

And lastly, I want to also say one of the remarkable things about General Flynn and also a couple of his successors was the way that he and they interacted with me. When I was in Afghanistan as a civilian, my official position became interloper.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL (RET.) MICHAEL FLYNN: He used the word “became” because he wasn’t really sure what he was going to do when he first got there.

MR. KAGAN: That’s quite – that’s right. Well, I had a sort of a quality official – at least General McChrystal invited me over to do something specific and subsequently I was there as an invited guest. Having a lot of opinions for commenting generals, which most bureaucrats and senior officers would not have been very welcoming toward. When civilians come in with bright ideas and pass them along to the boss, that’s not usually something that endears you to, for example, the head of intelligence. But General Flynn was always only interested in getting it right and understanding what was going on as best he could, seeking out the best ideas from wherever they might come, and finding ways to implement them. And I think that, to my mind, is the hallmark to the finest attributes of the people who serve in our military and our intelligence community. And so I’m really thrilled and honored to have General Flynn with us here today.

LT. GEN. FLYNN: I appreciate it.

MR. KAGAN: Thank you, Sir. So I’m going to start with an easy question. We have this war going with al Qaeda and ISIS. President gave his view yesterday about how it is. What’s your take? How are we doing?

LT. GEN. FLYNN: So you know, let me just – I’m going to like move around a little bit, not physically, but intellectually, sort of tactical to strategic and then back. And it may not be in any kind of order if you’re expecting an order from me.

And you know, the request to be here was a few weeks ago, before Paris, before San Bernardino, before the speech last night that the president gave. So it’s fascinating that, you know, I mean, you know, just going back and forth, I wasn’t sure about time, but it’s important because I don’t see myself as an activist, I see myself as a national security advocate. And I, like I said to about 10 million listeners this morning on a live video broadcast that I want to cheer for the president of the United States. I want to cheer for my president. I want to cheer for my country. And I find it very difficult to cheer for what is going on right now because there’s very little to cheer because there’s not a lot of confidence and there’s definitely not a lot of clarity.

So all that said, so much has happened in like a month, and this was probably the request to sit here today was like maybe six weeks ago. In fact, I even think it was before the attack in Lebanon, the attacks in Lebanon and the downing of the aircraft. So, fascinating the speed at which things are unfolding.

So today, today, right now, right now – I just mentioned this to – because I just got it as I was literally coming into the building – an alert that I get. And I – you know – it came from a good source. Today, West Point U.S. Military Academy – any West Pointers in here? Yeah. Well, West Point is on high alert right now. It’s on the highest level of alert they’ve ever been on because – and the federal level and state level are sending bio and chemical Hazmat teams to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Right now, right now because of a credible alert – a credible threat to West Point. It’s completely locked down. So you know, google it because it’s sort of the first report, but it came from a good media source that I know.

So there are things that are unfolding in front of our eyes that we have to recognize them for what they are. And this – I’ve been very passionate for years about clearly defining the enemy that we’re facing. You have to. You can’t kid about this. You can’t – you know, and so that clear definition requires really precise language – really, really, really, really precise language. Because until you have clearly done that, you clearly identified that enemy, you can’t get into – from sort of an intel analytic perspective and certainly an intel officer who’s served in a variety of intel jobs over the years, you can’t start to break down, you know, the strengths, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and all the aspects of this enemy that we are facing.

And when you – so if you’re at a tactical level, you know, I – to stay close contact with a lot of people – the tactical level, they’re able to kind of do that, but if you don’t have that strategic top cover and, you know, when you’re trying to push what it is that you’re trying to do up the chain, then nothing is going to happen or is going to happen at a pace that is not capable of actually achieving the mission that the president actually stated a number of years ago – a number of years ago.

So I said I’m going to jump around a little bit. And I’ll, you know, pause in a second here, Fred, to just maybe throw some other questions or something.

Al-Baghdadi, he actually was captured twice. Most people don’t know that. They think that, you know, people remember, well, he’s in – you know, we had him one time. We actually had him twice and we hunted him. You know, we hunted him like others that we hunted and captured or killed. But he was actually in prison twice. So he had two opportunities to build and thicken and reinforce an ideology that he absolutely believes in.

You know, when you think about bin Laden and Zawahiri, when they get in front of a video camera, you know, what are they wearing and what are they carrying and what are they saying? So a lot of them, a lot of their videos, you go back and look at them, you know, a couple of them, maybe it’s in it one individual, and they’re sitting there cross- legged. They got an AK across their lap.

Al-Baghdadi is much smarter. So this is a – you know, we talk about 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever we’re facing – I’ll talk to that here in one second. This guy gets up there in the right dress, the appropriate robes in a mosque in Mosul, very historic city, and preaches – preaches to the Ummah, right, to the Ummah. And does it a completely different way.

So he basically puts himself above, in this case, because Zawahiri is still alive, he puts himself above them. Very select, very smart. There’s a fascinating book. I’m not sure whether it’s fiction or not, that’s called “Dogs of God.” And anyway, I read it a while back because it talks about, a little bit about the 14th, 15th century and kind of the way people think.

The problem that people that go, well, these guys are, you know, they’re in shower shoes, in bathrobes, and they’re – you know, they want, you know, 700 years ago. They use, you know, this modernity extremely effectively. I mean, it was like six months ago they had 20,000 websites. Anybody that – you know, everybody should know, if you don’t, you should know about Dabiq magazine. It’s only one of a couple of magazine, but it’s a really good one. You should read it.

The day after the Paris attacks, actually – because that was a Friday, it was actually Monday or Tuesday, they published their like 10th anniversary edition, 65 pages, incredibly glossy, you know, absolutely superb, professional product, you know.

So when people talk about an organization – you know, and they just didn’t come up with that capability from the Paris attacks. They didn’t just recruit a bunch of really talented people to do a magazine at that level. That’s something that has to build over time. So when we talk about what it is that we’re facing and how rapidly they rose or what we knew or didn’t know, I mean we knew – we knew when – because actually Zarqawi, the head of AQI actually created the current Islamic State. So he named it the Islamic State in the land between the two rivers. There’s an Arabic phrase for it, but anyway.

So he goes, you know, the way of the wolf, so to speak, and al-Masri, you know, he was the head of foreign fighters for Zarqawi. And you know, he goes, he gets rolled up, killed. Then, you have al-Baghdadi and a couple of other, you know, of their cohorts. Al-Baghdadi ends up getting put back into prison, gets released – subsequently released, but really, starting about 2011, this current threat they were facing actually began to come back and rise again. And the number of – if you follow just 2011 and all the way up to today, you follow what it is that they’ve been doing, they’re very, very savvy – very savvy. And there’s an article out yesterday or today in the Guardian. And it’s an individual who wrote about – he’s been in Syria for a while and he’s been looking for different things. He’s been looking for a different story and an interesting story that he found was the discovery of really a campaign plan and an organizational structure that likely – and I believe it because I’ve seen this many, many times, it’s a valid document, I read it and I – about a month ago, and I gave him some feedback on it.

But it talks about the inoculation of children in this cause. It talks about the sort of the long-term vision and plan that they have. So anybody that says we should just – 10,000 guys and we’ll go kill them all and we’re going to drop some bombs, we have been so narrowly focused on this problem, so narrowly focused. And frankly, this goes back not just to this administration, but this administration has raised its seven years, we go back to the Bush administration as well because we also argued then about things. And the one real big sort of strategic credit that I give to President Bush is that in the summer of 2006, even after Zarqawi and everybody felt good, he’s dead, actually that was an incredibly violent year, that summer.

And what President Bush began to recognize and he was getting this feedback from the field is that we were failing. We were losing. They were losing in Iraq. We’re losing to guys who I’ve heard described by senior leaders in our government, who are these guys in shower shoes and bathrobes, how come we can’t beat them? So I’ve heard that from senior people who should know better. They should know better.

So when you describe somebody like that or you describe an Afghan as an Afghani, Afghani is money. An Afghan is the citizen, is the human. So you Afghanis, I’ve heard leaders go, you Afghanis. I think that’s money, you know? I mean, so it’s precision, precision, precision and understanding. And we really, we failed to really do a really good job of that.

At least Bush recognized that we are failing. He changed horses. You know, brings General Petraeus in, a new campaign plan, brings Bob Gates in, a new secretary. And that was a struggle. And all you’ve got to do is, you know, read everything that Secretary Gates has written about in his book and op-eds and all this stuff about the trials that he faced. OK?

Our government right now is – let’s me just back up a little bit. I used the phrase speed is the new big. OK, speed is the new big. And what I mean by that is that our inability to make decisions in our government – we would never ever have one World War II, never mind some other aspects of what we’ve done, with the government structure that we have today. I mean, we are incapable of making decisions, other than tactical decisions to go, you know, strike a guy’s head or do a raid here. I mean, we’re not talking about a bombing campaign that’s dropping whatever number of bombs, you know, and taking 75 percent home. That argument is narrow. That argument is tactical and that’s for the tacticians. That’s for the people who want to, you know, have some agenda.

What I’m talking about is a vision for this country that transcends not just this president, but like the next four or five or six. And that to me, you know, where America’s at today and why there’s this uncertainty in our campaigning that’s out there and why do people like these different people that are out there, it’s because America is looking for – we don’t want to know what we’re going to do tomorrow to ISIS. That’s easy. Drop some more bombs, you know. I mean, the Germans are involved now. The Brits finally got involved. So I thought we had a 62-nation coalition.

The Germans just decided really today – today – a couple of aircraft, and I think 1,200 troops. And I think they’re going to put a ship down in the Eastern Med. You know, the French finally decided because they, you know, they’ve been attacked twice. So we need a – and this is not just about the Middle East folks. This is about a global problem that we’re facing in this half of this century, this first half of this century. We’re already two decades or – yeah, already into the second decade of the 21st century.

So we’re facing something that we’re going to deal with, you know, in addition – so you know, this is not really the topic and I’m going to stop here in a second, Fred. In addition to the pivot to the Pacific, right, or the Russian reset, you know, I mean, those are huge problems. You know, or cyber something, even though, you know, the Islamic hacking division has a pretty good track record right now. And it’s some of the other challenges that we face, some of the other challenges that we face.

So two points. One, when people go, the nation is war weary, that’s baloney. The military is war weary, definitely. And then, you know, those, the civilians – when I say the military, it’s not just those in uniform and so. It’s those that have been going back and forth and back and forth. This nation is not really war weary. We’ve never put a tax on anything to do this stuff. Some resources have been used, but you know what, the nation’s not into this war because presidents, plural, have decided to not make it so. And so I – you know, I’ll end it there because I’ll, you know, maybe answer some questions on the other point. OK?

MR. KAGAN: Thanks, Sir. I really agree with you about the generational nature of the struggle and our underestimation of it. But I think one thing that is particularly confusing to people is the relationship between the domestic terrorism that we just saw, that is to say the terrorism of people who are American citizens, who were radicalized. I’m not – I’m personally not prepared to say these guys were self-radicalized, but that who were radicalized in some way. And the connection between that and the safe havens that al Qaeda and ISIS have in other countries.

And I see a temptation – strong temptation coming from the White House and other places and on both sides of the aisle to say, look, this is fundamentally – we need to focus on protecting the homeland here. We need to focus on law enforcement. We need to focus on border reform, gun control, and all like that.

Can you just talk a little bit about the connection that you see between the kind of attack that we’ve just witnessed and the safe havens and the global problem?

LT. GEN. FLYNN: OK. So here in this country, we have ISIL-inspired individuals and groups that exist in this country today. You know, again, pay attention to what our great FBI director says and then read between the lines, OK? This latest attack – they’re still trying to figure it out, easy to figure out, this girl that I believe was the operative and the guy was the sort of the sleeper. And she – her purpose – Flynn’s assessment – her purpose was to turn the sleeper agent on. Because sleeper agents – and you think it’s some mythical thing, you know, you only hear about in, you know, movies or in books. They exist. So her purpose was to turn that sleeper agent on. And then, their target selection, you know, we’ll discover why as we go, but.

So on Facebook, the day of and during the attack, she put on Facebook her affiliation with ISIL. So there’s this inspiration that’s a global inspiration. And one of the problems that we’ve had is that we always – and this is a classic – particularly military, but it’s classic American, at least in the last few decades. We tend to say, you know, where – and I’m going to try not to be too Irish up here with my language, but you know, where did those bastards come from? Where are they from? And so we go to where we think they’re from, instead of taking a step back and understanding why. So we have to really understand why because it’s not, you know, it’s not a couple of thousand, 10,000 or 40,000, this, we’re talking millions. Millions that have been exposed and have a belief system that actually believes in some of what they say.

I’ll tell you what. If I was a member of one of those soccer teams standing in that Ankara soccer stadium the other day, I’d have been scared to death. I would have possibility said, I don’t know if we can play. Does everybody know what I’m talking about with that stadium?

MR. KAGAN: I don’t think so.

LT. GEN. FLYNN: Yeah, I mean – I mean, this is my life. This fellow is trying to make a living. I mean, I pay attention to all this stuff. I mean, I would have been scared to death. This is after the attack in Paris. The stadium is rocking by the fans yelling Allahu Akbar, while they were supposed to have a moment of silence. I mean, it’s unbelievable. Go google it. It’s unbelievable. I’d have been scared to death had I been standing in that stadium and I was one of those team. Holly – you know, I mean, for those that saw it or saw it on a follow up, it’s unbelievable, unbelievable.

That to me is symptomatic of our problem. Our problem is that we are – we have a – we’re a nation based on ideas, but we’re a nation based on a Judeo-Christian system. You know, all you’ve got to do is go back to well before we created ourselves as a country. Now, the whole idea of freedom of religion. So we’re like nervous about this.

To my point – the other point I was going to make is that Islam is a political ideology based on a religion, OK? So if you read the Koran, you read the Hadiths, you engage in the conversations, you read – more important – read the constitutions of countries that are the Islamic republic of. OK? Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran. Read the monarchs, Morocco, Saudi, Jordan, and read their constitutions. What are their constitutions based on? The Saudis, two primary things that the Saudis want. They want to protect their religion and they want to maintain their security. That’s what they want. Al-Jubeir, former ambassador here to the United States, now foreign minister, about maybe two months ago now, in an interview, when asked, you know, where is your head at kind of, and I don’t remember the specific question, but his answer was, we want to protect our religion and we want to protect our security.

So we have to understand how entrenched the religious aspect is into the political system. It’s not – so this is a political ideology based on a religion. And I will argue that and I will be willing to have an open mind to be pushed back on that, but that’s from talking to, you know, senior members of our enemy, OK, and asking them, what drives, you, why? And they start to get into the political debate, not the religious debate.

I’m an Irish Catholic kid from the Northeast. You know, I don’t have that consciousness that they have when they talk about what their belief system is in terms of their religion and how they want to impose it politically – politically. So that’s another aspect. And so this is not an academic argument. This is very practical, very real, because this is the belief system. So if that belief system is the case, they’re willing to fight and die for it to establish it, to establish it.

And the number of groups that we have that have been created or recreated, you know – most people don’t remember the – I think it’s the GSPC, which was under a guy named al-Para in essentially Algeria, Mali, all the way down to the Gulf of Guinea. And that was a big cigarette-smuggling organization. OK? Many, many years, they have all the routes going up all through North Africa. Al-Para was eventually killed because al- Para was subverted by a guy named Belmokhtar, who stood up something called al Qaeda in the Maghreb. So this goes back like 20-25 years.

So just that little, you know, lesson in expansion, so now you have four groups underneath Belmokhtar in that part and affiliated with ISIS. So they have sort of claimed affiliation. So you can’t just look at a sound bite or listen to the president speak. We need people that have really been deeply thinking about this problem and looking at it not backwards, but how do we solve this problem going forward. How do we solve this problem going forward?

Where is the vision for this country because I don’t look at this as bad times. I actually look at this as an opportunity to remind people of why and who we are as a nation. This is an opportunity for these politicians that are arguing about, in some cases, stupid things. There’s a few that are pretty thoughtful, but we need – we need people who transcend, you know, my administration. We don’t have that right now. We didn’t have that actually before either. And I didn’t realize that until I really thought more about it with a little bit more hindsight in watching kind of the sine wave of activities, you know. And again, I’ll stop here.

Never mind if you take just a really broad brush look at China and Chinese investment for the last – at least the last 10 years if not 15 to 20, and you look at where China is investing around the world, while we’ve been narrowly focused, folks, OK, we’ve been narrowly focused on really issues that we can’t seem to get out of our own bureaucratic way. And the Chinese have been very methodic. They haven’t taken advantage of it. They’ve just stuck to a plan. And anybody pays attention to the World Monetary Fund, International Monetary Fund, just last week, China’s Yuan now can be bought and sold – it finally met the conditions they’ve been trying this for a long time. So now, a central bank of any country, of country X can buy or sell the Yuan instead of the U.S. dollar. It’s a big deal. It’s a huge deal actually. It may take some time.

So you know, if you’re a money buyer, which all central banks are, because they’re trying to get the best price for their markets and their economy around the world, they’re buying and selling and they base it off the U.S. dollar, the price of a dollar matched to whatever their currency is. OK, well, now the Yuan can now be – you can now do that with the Yuan. It’s a big deal.

And that took a lot. They had to meet some conditions – very, very political. And we supported it. I’m not sure that was a great idea. Because just, you know – I don’t know who said it, but, you know, this business, I’m sure it was said like 200 years ago, but I’ve heard Henry Kissinger say it at times, you know, this is not about making friends with people. This is about interests, right?

So this is, what is the – what is in the best interest of the United States of America for the long haul. And do you have that vision and then can you actually on a practical day-to-day basis, can you execute? Can you execute? And that’s why, you know, Fred’s, you know, really, you know, comment about, you know, working with civilians, whatever. That’s – I appreciate that, but it’s a – that’s minor. We have to figure out ways to overcome this bureaucratic inertia that is stifling our country right now, folks. It is stifling.

And I really do believe that the president is not well served. This president is not well served by people around him, in this case, that, you know – now, you can also say, well, he’s the president, he should know better. And yeah, you’re right, he should know better. But you know, I don’t want to be somebody who’s sitting, you know, and beating up on the president. Our system is causing this. Now, ideologies aside, we have got to figure this out because this problem that we face, the wolf closest to the sled, called, you know, the Islamic State and this radicalization – to get to your, you know, your broad question – we have got to stop this. And then, we’ve got to figure out how to reform it, how to reform it. And the Arab world has huge, huge responsibilities, otherwise they’re going to be part of the bigger problem over the long haul, so –

MR. KAGAN: General, I really appreciate you giving us the really broad perspective, which is so very important because it’s so easy for us to become focused on these particular stovepipes. We, you know, recognizing the magnitude of the challenge and the need to take it broadly and the need to focus on what is to be done, we have put together a report which is the beginning of a process of trying to do that, and I’m going to call the panelists up here in a second so that we can start presenting that to the audience and discussing it. But I’m extremely grateful to you for being with us today and for sharing your thoughts.

LT. GEN. FLYNN: Let me make –

MR. KAGAN: Please.

LT. GEN. FLYNN: Let me make one other comment. And this has to do with the Iranian nuclear deal. The Iranian nuclear deal – so again, this is a bit hindsight, but I think that we knew this going in. The Iranian nuclear deal brought together the movers and shakers of the world, right? The P-5+1, you know, you could sort of have Japan and South Korea sort of as a backbencher because of, you know, resources that they can bring to bear, but we had an extraordinary opportunity to, I think, change the direction of the world, instead of the direction that we’re going in right now.

And instead, we decided, and I think we were lulled into it, to a degree, possibly by, you know, by the Russians, certainly by the influences from Iran into this country, to narrowly focus on allowing a state – the largest state sponsor of terrorism, you know, a nation that’s already, you know – everybody knows all the stuff that they’ve said – so we narrowly focused on giving the largest state sponsor of terrorism, you know, become a nuclear threshold state, instead of – everybody in that room, before Iran or anybody was even able to get into that room, to have the movers and shakers together, what we should have done, and it’s still possible to a degree. It’s still possible. Because there’s no – that deal hasn’t been signed yet. So you could still do it in some type of international forum where you could talk about broader goals that we want to achieve.

Because until – this is a problem right now – until Iran backs out of the proxy wars that they are in – and Russia could do that today, Russia could tell them today – so until they back out, we’re not going to solve this problem, folks. And all we can do is like – it’s like throwing water, you know, on coal or coals or actually throwing sand on coals at a beach. It’s just going to stay – those embers are going to stay hot for a long time.

We’ve got to get Iran to back out. They’ve got to back out. They can be directed to back out. But we – instead, you know, all this proxy fighting was going on while we’re negotiating with the country that’s doing all the proxy fighting and causing greater instability, we’re going to hand them over or give them the ability to be a nuclear threshold state. I mean, we have got to learn lessons. We have got to think historically, you know, in these difficult times – because we’ve had difficult times as a nation. And you know, we can, United States of America can juggle multiple balls. We can. And we have not demonstrated that we can, but I know we can. We have, you know, the absolute capability to do that. We have the absolute capability to do that, but we did not do that and that’s too bad for the nation and too bad for where we are today.

Now what we have to deal with in the future here, and the future being like five years, 10 years, you know. If you haven’t read Newt Gingrich’s speech that he just gave to the National Defense University the other day – I don’t know if you have it or you posted it – it’s worth reading. It’s very unbiased, you know, for a guy who’s pretty biased. It’s actually a very – it’s a very good speech. I’ll tell you. It’s worth reading. It’s worth reading.

MR. KAGAN: Thank you, Sir. Thank you, thank you very, very much. (Applause.)

LT. GEN. FLYNN: Yeah, thanks.

(Cross talk.)

LT. GEN. FLYNN: OK, have a good –

MR. KAGAN: Come on up, panelists.

LT. GEN. FLYNN: Have fun and Merry Christmas.

MR. KAGAN: All right, so we’ll do our quick change here and we’ll roll directly into our discussion of a strategy to combat al Qaeda. And joining me here are some of the authors of this report. We have had quite a few people working very hard on this for a long time. Mary Habeck has been the leader and the energy behind this effort. I’ve known Mary for longer than I will say. We were in graduate school together, studying Soviet military history, which at the time, seemed like an interesting academic pursuit, has come to seem like a much more of a real world challenge, once again, as we have a KGB thug by the name of Vladimir Putin dusting off all of the Soviet approaches and playing them on us in various different keys.

So Mary has shifted her efforts to the threat of our day, which violent Islamism in all of its forms, written a number of books and just brings a tremendous amount of intellectual curiosity and thoughtfulness to the project.

Also Seth Jones, whom I’ve also known – had the privilege of knowing for a long time, now at RAND, but more often to be found in extremely pleasant vacation spots such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, most recently. Seth is one of those who goes where the fighting is hot and works with our men and women in uniform and out to find the best way to combat our enemies. And he’s also extremely thoughtful and an excellent strategic thinker. Really thrilled to have him part of this effort and here to talk with us today.

And lastly, Katherine Zimmerman, who is the head of our al Qaeda study effort at the Critical Threats Project. I have had the privilege of working with Kathy for six and a half some years. And she has also made the garden spots of the world her focus and has brought a tremendous amount of energy and creativity and thoughtfulness and meticulousness to the study of the open source materials that are available to us.

So without further ado, I’ll turn it over to Mary to start us of on the topic of the day.

MARY HABECK: I’d like to begin by apologizing for reading my remarks, but it’s such a complicated subject and such a huge subject that I want to make sure that I had some clarity and some concision in the remarks that I put forward. So please forgive me for doing this. But I think we’ve all been horrified by the terrible events in San Bernardino and in Paris, but the context of these atrocities are not just a few radicalized individuals who randomly decided to kill their neighbors. The context is this – and if I could have the first slide up. Sorry, Fred. Maybe you have to point it at that thing, something over there? No.

MR. KAGAN: All right, we’ll – here. Thank you. OK, we’ll get that slide for you.

MS. HABECK: Yes, AEI.

MR. KAGAN: That’s our slide. There you go.

MS. HABECK: OK, next one.

MR. KAGAN: Next one, super.

MS. HABECK: So this is the problem that we faced from al Qaeda insurgencies in 2011. Four countries that were suffering very terribly from their depredations. And I’d like to point out something that the CTC at West Point pointed out in 2009. The vast majority of the people who are being killed by al Qaeda and ISIS are other Muslims.

In 2009, they pointed out it was eight times as many Muslims that were being killed as non-Muslims in their terrorist attacks alone, let alone in insurgencies, when it was more like 20 times as many. So the people who are suffering the very most from it are ordinary Muslims.

And back in 2011, there were four countries that were suffering very terribly from this. Unfortunately, in 2015, this is the problem we’ll dealing with. So we have al Qaeda- linked and ISIS-linked insurgencies in more than a dozen countries. And 320,000 people dead alone in Syria. So the growing strength and spread of ISIS and al Qaeda have basically reached our shores. And we’re called upon to have a response that rises to the challenge posed by the extremists.

That’s the purpose of our strategy, a global response to a global threat. This strategy is not about telling us what we want to hear. It’s about describing the actual problem that we’re confronting and proposing an effective and implementable strategy and a way forward.

We’re confronting two entities with one radical jihadist ideology, ISIS and al Qaeda, that have grown from mostly terrorist threats to insurgencies in a dozen countries, as you can see, many of which are capable – these insurgencies are capable of holding territory and controlling the lives of millions. ISIS alone claims to control the lives of 10 million people in Iraq and Syria.

So in response, we propose a global counterinsurgency strategy that will reduce al Qaeda and ISIS back to the original terrorist group that they were in the late 1980s, small and incapable of carrying out mass casualty terrorist attacks. This can happen only when we have degraded the extremist capabilities until they’re once again unable to recruit enough followers to replace leaders lost, to hold territory or enforce their very, very extremist version of Sharia or to carry out anything but minor and local terrorist attacks.

The need for a new strategy has been conclusively shown by Paris and San Bernardino. But ISIS and al Qaeda always threaten more than just distant countries in the Muslim majority world. For the past few years, I feel that we’ve been deceiving ourselves about the size and scope of this threat because we all want an end to war. Who doesn’t? You know, we grew tired of the constant fighting in the war on terror and we want to deal with our own problems, rather than those of the Middle East.

We wanted to believe that ISIS and al Qaeda affiliates were locally focused, discrete problems, independent from any outside control and that therefore the U.S. could focus solely on keeping ourselves safe, while leaving the hard work of combating the insurgencies that they had spawned to local partners and friends. But this was always a misconception. None of our partners and friends in the region are capable of taking on and defeating by themselves the insurgents threatening to overrun their countries.

I challenge us to consider, for instance, just look from Syria, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, Somalia, Mali, Nigeria, wherever you look, every single one of those countries have had to have outside assistance, boots on the ground to have any success at all in combating ISIS and al Qaeda.

The countries of the Muslim majority world always needed more than airstrikes to kill of the terrorists and leave extremists to therefore overrun territory, murder and intimidate entire populations into doing their will, and inspired killers in many countries to imitate them because of their successes on the ground.

We’re also deceiving ourselves if we believe we can depend solely on allies, partners, and friends to meet our national security needs. On what basis do we believe that other people should risk their lives in these battlefields to meet our needs while we watch the carnage from a distance? Why wouldn’t they rightfully try to achieve their own national security interests?

If we won’t put any skin in the game, we have no right to demand that others do so, so we get what we want. If we want to be safe, we have to engage directly, boots on the ground alongside our partners, allies, and friends, fighting beside them to defeat the extremists. Otherwise, we’re empowering these nations and groups and our partners to fulfill their interests and not our own.

Boots on the ground are necessary for other reasons as well, to roll back the territory held by these two groups, to end once and for all the safe havens they’re using to plot and plan against, and to free the ordinary Muslims whose lives they’re controlling through murder and intimidation.

But this is not an argument for unilateral invasions and a large-scale U.S. presence, like the Iraq war. Rather, it’s an argument for working in smaller numbers, smartly, with partners, allies, and friends to take on the insurgents, using the successful counterinsurgency strategy pioneered by General Petraeus. This would mean a population-centric vision of warfare that will, working with partners, clear, hold, and build on a regional basis.

The strategy argues for beginning with the region of the Levant and Iraq, but immediately afterward taking on the problem of the extremists in the Arabian Peninsula and in South Asia. The role for the U.S. will, in most cases, be as trainers, enablers, and in small numbers, partners in the fight. But there are some areas where we have no partners and we will have to take a larger role in combating the extremists.

Our plan is also an argument for a strategic engagement rather than a quick fix, and therefore, for a commitment to a long war that will win over bipartisan public support for this endeavor. As many observers noted and as we’ve just heard from General Flynn, this is a generational challenge. It requires us to have a generational approach, one that brings Americans together to confront the extremists as a united front.

This all sounds impossible, a pipedream, given the divisive nature of American politics, the inherent difficulties in a counterinsurgent fight, let alone a global one, right, and the seeming inability of the U.S. to focus long term on any one problem. But we can have assurance that this is not just an effective strategy, but an implementable one as well, given our past experience with precisely this sort of global long-term challenge.

In 1947-’48, immediately after a terrible war and the demobilization of the military and in the face of public opposition, President Truman and his national security team were able to make a compelling argument for another long-term engagement in order to take on and defeat communism and the Soviet Union. Their arguments for a proactive confrontation of the Soviet Union and a global approach led eventually to the collapse of the Soviet Union and of communism as an ideology. That is the sort of leadership and vision we need today in order to keep ourselves safe and to end, once and for all, the threat posed by the extremists. Thank you.

MR. KAGAN: Thanks, Mary. This report that we’ve put out, we’re very careful to specify that it is a grand strategy. It is an overarching framework into which a lot of specific theater strategies will need to be developed. And I want to emphasize that. You can look through this report. You can read it. And you may come away wondering what it is exactly. What is the model that we’re pursuing? Is it the Yemen model? Is it the Somalia model, and so forth? I personally don’t think that there is – if we’re talking about models, we’re not understanding this. If we find an approach to work in Yemen, we can be reasonably confident that it will work in Yemen, and that’s it because the truth is that each one of these theaters and each one of these societies are very different.

Obviously, there are principles that are applicable from one theater to the other, but I think that we’ve spent too much time looking for the magic bullet and the model to apply. And I think any time you hear someone talking about applying the model developed in one place to another, you’re hearing a recipe for failure, in my view.

So we have worked on some of these strategies in other places. Katy can talk some about the Yemen planning exercise. We are going through a similar planning exercise with our friends at the Institute for the Study of War on Syria and Iraq. We will be rolling out a number of theater strategies that will fit into this overarching view. But to move from this overarching view to talk about some specifics, I think Seth is going to give us a little bit of insight, among other things, into Somalia and what’s been going on there and what we can learn from that maybe. So, Seth.

SETH JONES: Thanks, Fred. Thanks for coming, and thanks, Mary, for opening this up. And thanks, obviously, to General Flynn for really kicking this off.

I want to divide my remarks into three parts. The first one is I think it’s worth, for a moment, setting aside politics and asking coldly and objectively how do we know how we’re doing right now? And I would say if you look at the metrics – and we can argue about which ones they are – the trends don’t look good. And I think we have to be honest with ourselves right now in the direction we’re going, are they making our country safer? Is al Qaeda and particularly the Islamic State, ISIS, expanding? I would just say, based on additional work that we’ve done and published at RAND, I think one has to be very concerned about directions.

If we look at the number of jihadist groups over the past several decades, we’re at all-time highs now. We’re at all times high in the number of fighters, Salafi jihadist fighters. Levels of violence, particularly by the big Salafi jihadist groups. If we look at the spread of ISIS recently, not just, obviously, in Iraq and Syria, where much of the focus is, but the territory that they control now in Libya, along the Mediterranean; in the violence that’s going on within Somalia between now members of al-Shabaab that have pledged allegiance to ISIS. In Yemen, we see attacks by cells of ISIS in the country. Saudi Arabia, they – what used to be Ansar Beit al-Maqdis took down the Russian airliner, a pledged allegiance. We’ve got a Nigeria, Boko Haram’s pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.

We look at the cells in the last year and a half that have been set up in southern and eastern Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan by ISIS. You take a look at some of the scrolling on the – some of the buildings in Karachi – the ISIS scrolling on the walls. I don’t see these signs and these metrics as indications that the problem is getting better. And this is why I think walking down this road that Mary has laid out, that Fred has just talked about is so important. Because, again, I think we’ve got to really rethink the direction that U.S. grand strategy, strategy, and then in each of our theaters that we’re going in.

One of the things that also struck me last year, working on a commission in the FBI that looked at the FBI counterterrorism capabilities, you know, we’ve got open FBI cases on individuals directly or in many cases indirectly linked to ISIS in every state in the U.S. now – every state. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll lead to arrests, but open cases. That tells you a little bit about the prevalence we have now in the U.S. of individuals that are plotting or would like to plot some kind of attacks. And again, many of these are pretty rudimentary, so I wouldn’t overstate them in that many of them aren’t going to be Paris style attacks. But you still get a sense, I think, of the threat.

I want to briefly just note one area I think that has seen some success against, in this case it’s an al Qaeda affiliate that I think gives us a sense of how it could be done. And this really goes to the great work the military has done in a country that one would never predict future success, certainly not lightly. It’s been problematic for decades, particularly since the early 1990s. But one of the interesting things if you look at the metrics in Somalia, al-Shabaab controlled about 55 percent of the territory by late 2010. Today, it controls about 5 percent.

I’ve been back and forth this year, looking at the U.S. involvement in the campaign. And I’d highlight a couple of things that I would say come out of Mary’s work that are interesting. One is we had a local partner there that conducted the ground operations. We heard last night the importance of airstrikes. You need a ground component to control and hold territory.

Now, in the Somali case, this was done primarily by the neighbors, the Ethiopians, the Kenyans, which controlled the ground. Everything from Operation Linda Nchi in 2011, the operations that came down the Indian Ocean called Operation Indian Ocean, in 2014; Jubba Corridor in 2015, which I got to see relatively close up. The U.S. part of that in this case, the U.S. role was training, advice, and assisting. As Mary laid out, there was a strike component to it embedded with particularly Kenyan forces. And there was a help and coordination operations with a range of the African Union, the Amazon countries and their chiefs of defense that were involved in this. U.S. role was incredibly important. I don’t think we could have seen that kind of, at least, limited success without the U.S. role.

A range of other things, al-Shabaab was a really poor governing – was really poor at governing in areas that it controlled, had a lot of divisions, including over its reaction to the famine in 2011 and ’12. But I think what we see in a case like this is a group. And remember, for a number of these groups, not just ISIS, they need to control territory. They need to control it for financing. They need it for recruitment and mobilization. They need it to tell a story and a narrative that you need to come fight with them because they’re winning.

And in the places where we’ve seen them lose – lose the territory, lose the finances, lose the fighters, it’s been a range of the things that Mary laid out. So I would say if you’re asking for specifics, this is one case in one country. This one is not over by any means. But where we’ve see that territory shrink markedly. And again, they’re going to get involved in a range of attacks. So an organization like that is not over.

Let me just finally say one last thing, which is that I think Mary mentioned Truman before. You know, if you close your eyes and you go back to the early 1980s, when Reagan came into office in January of 1981, he obviously faced a pretty serious situation as well. As part of a book I’m working, I’ve gone back and relooked at the national security strategic documents during those first two years in office. They’re profound in the focus on national security strategy, then focusing on the Soviet Union, and then focusing on parts of it, including in Eastern Europe.

And you know, what’s interesting is they’re very strategic. They get down to tactical levels. They include political, ideological – remember the role of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty. They included a clandestine and an open component. They included a military and intelligence and economic. And that administration took it very seriously. This was a global fight against an organization that was just as much political and ideological as it was military on the ground.

And so I would say we’ve got historical models as well of what it’s like to struggle against a organization that is global or it’s partly global in nature, that is both political and military. And so we can go back to our own roots in understanding what kind of vision is necessary for it. So thanks for the opportunity to talk.

MR. KAGAN: Thanks, Seth. I totally agree with you and I have to say, I find myself reading and re-reading NSC-68, the pivotal document written by the policy planning staff under Paul Nitze in 1950, which recommended the strategy that we pursued successfully throughout the Cold War, and which was shelved in April of 1950 because it recommended a significant increase in the American – in the defense budget and so forth. And President Truman didn’t want to do that.

And then, North Korea invaded South Korea and the document was pulled out. And it is an amazing document. And it’s one of many amazing documents framing the problem, as you say, in a way that we really have to frame it now. And it’s incredibly disappointing, therefore, to hear the superficiality, the partisan political character of the sort of discussion that emerges from an Oval Office speech at this point.

And it’s also incredibly disappointing to me to hear an unwillingness to recognize that the strategy is failing. There’s no shame in having a failing strategy. This is incredibly hard. I don’t think any of us would sit up here and tell you that we have the answer. Do what we say and this will be good. There’s no problem. This is incredibly difficult. And we are going to fail many times over the next few generations, as we did during the Cold War. We’re going to have many setbacks and we’re going to make a lot of mistakes before we get to a successful outcome, which I believe that we can. But if we are unwilling to recognize that we are failing when we are failing and that we need to change our approach, then our odds of success are very low indeed. And that to me was the most disappointing feature of the president’s speech last night.

But one of the things that I want to highlight because I know Kathy wants to talk about this and it’s incredibly important is we have been blurring the lines between ISIS and al Qaeda here. And I want to be very clear about that because the document we put in front of you is not a document that is a strategy to defeat ISIS. It is a document that is a strategy to defeat the global Islamist movement, the global violent Islamist movement, but particularly al Qaeda. And it is amazing that we should be sitting here and having a discussion and having to say, you know, remember al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is actually still a problem out there. But we have become so narrowly focused on ISIS, which is extremely dangerous and is definitely the wolf closest to the threat – to the sled, but is not necessarily by any means the most dangerous of the two organizations. And that’s, I think, what Kathy will tell us a little bit about.

KATHERINE ZIMMERMAN: Yes, thank you, Fred, for taking my talking points. (Laughter.)

MR. KAGAN: I was teeing you up. (Laughter.)

MS. ZIMMERMAN: And thank you to Mary, again, for all the energy you put in pulling this report together and making sure that we have a fantastic product in front of us. I do want to talk about the global jihadist movement. And we heard General Flynn talking a little bit about how we as Americans were looking for where these guys came from, what we can attack and what we can go after. And what we’re not recognizing is that they’re part of a movement. And a movement doesn’t have a physical place that you can attack. And that’s something that we’ve been missing. And it’s why, frankly, I think we’ve been losing the war against al Qaeda and now ISIS for so many years.

These two organizations are members of a movement. There are other organizations, of course, that are part of the global jihadist movement. We don’t care as much about them simply because they haven’t moved into the global sphere. They haven’t demonstrated the capabilities that would raise them to the level of that – the Department of Homeland Security is worried about some guy coming across the border with a bomb and, you know, planning an attack against a mall, against a significant financial target here in the United States. I do think it’s been problematic for us over the years, as we talk about the threats from these groups in parsing them out one by one. We’re talking about ISIS today. ISIS is an extremely large threat for a variety of reasons. It’s changed the dialogue. It’s fundamentally changed the course of how this movement is going.

But we’ve also lost sight of what the threat that al Qaeda is posing to the United States. I’ve read op-eds saying that, you know, maybe we should work with al Qaeda for the time being. It’s not as bad as ISIS.

Do they understand what al Qaeda means? It’s looking to achieve the same objectives as ISIS. It’s following a different strategy. It’s pursuing a global jihadi strategy that is conducting attacks against the United States, against Western targets to force us to retreat. This is not a group that wants to ally itself with us.

Certainly it’s going to take the benefit from our policy of focusing on ISIS, and it’s certainly been doing so over the past couple of years. You can see al Qaeda slowly growing and expanding. And this has been something that I think the graphics in Mary’s report really bring out is when you’re looking at the al Qaeda insurgencies, they have grown significantly over the past four to five years since the Arab spring. Part of that can be a break down in our local partners and the governance there, but part of that is also a strategy.

Al Qaeda is not using its name the way that it used to. Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, not in Somalia, doesn’t call itself al Qaeda. Neither does the group in Somalia. These groups have a different name and they’re kind of skating by a little bit. We have to remind people that al-Shabaab is part of Somalia. Its late leader had fought in Afghanistan, was part of the core al Qaeda network. And it is pursuing in its own local way the objectives of the broader movement.

The narrative today is that the growth of ISIS, as you see groups, small groups pledging to ISIS in – we had one recently in Algeria. You’re looking across the board, you have a very strong ISIS presence in Libya, in the Sinai. I’m not going to rehash what Seth went through, but we have strong ISIS presences across the Muslim majority world.

The narrative is that that’s weakening al Qaeda and that it’s somehow pulling away at the core of a network. The thing that’s been missed is that those groups haven’t taken with them any of al Qaeda’s core capabilities. Al Qaeda preserves its leadership, its resources to a lesser degree partially because some of the Gulf funding has switched, but it does have the resources on the ground because it controls territory. It maintains some sort of attraction to its ideology. You still see fighters going to fight with al Qaeda. ISIS is extremely popular but it’s not popular with everybody.

And as you’re looking through this, you can see that al Qaeda has preserved what it was and the capability to regenerate into the threat that we thought it was a couple of years ago.

And I really want to bring that back because if you look at the narrative going into the Arab spring, it was all about al Qaeda. Al Qaeda core has been decimated but it’s reconstituted in Yemen, and AQAP, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group in Yemen, is now the biggest threat to the homeland. And we are going to defeat them by conducting air strikes and working with a local partner.

I heard that last night, and I look at what’s happening in Yemen. And AQAP is actually stronger today than it was in 2009. AQAP has mirror-imaged what Jabhat al- Nusra has done in Syria. It’s started to integrate into local governance structures. It works with this group in one of Yemen’s three major port cities. It’s just reconstituting in territory that was re-cleared in 2011. You’re looking at these groups and you’re saying, gosh, we really are losing.

So I would say, as you’re looking at al Qaeda and saying, well, there hasn’t been a big bang from the group and that’s what it’s made its name on. If you look back at al Qaeda’s hallmark of fame, it’s got the 1998 embassy bombings, the Cole attack, 9/11, and attempts thereafter including the successful attacks, I should say, in Europe.

Al Qaeda doesn’t need to conduct an attack right now. Its objective is not to attack the United States. That’s something that’s missed here. Al Qaeda’s objective is to force the United States and the West to disengage some with the Middle East.

I don’t see the West really engaged in Libya right now. We’re tangentially engaged in Mali. There’s some governance issues and we want that to be a local fight. And we have outsourced our policy in Yemen effectively to the Gulf States for a variety of reasons. But it has meant that there has been a retreat by and large. We’re less engaged in Iraq and Syria.

Al Qaeda’s doing pretty well when you’re looking at it. And if it attacks the United States, it draws back all of the attention that we’re now focused on ISIS. If you’re a covert organization, it might be good to stay in the shadows. So what I really think that al Qaeda is doing right now is pursuing a strategy of lying low and growing.

That means that our piecemeal approach you’re hearing put forward is going to be problematic. It was problematic when it started, when we went after just al Qaeda in Afghanistan or just al Qaeda in Iraq or just al Qaeda in Yemen. And it was a brief flash when we went after al Qaeda in Somalia. But we haven’t managed to defeat a global network, and it’s resilient. And Mary has done some excellent work on that and we have those available.

But the al Qaeda network has come back because we’ve only gone after it in certain areas. We’re seeing the same problem with ISIS. We’re only going after ISIS in Iraq and Syria. ISIS is not contained. You’ve just heard us list a series of countries where there are ISIS groups. They don’t have the same resilience the way that al Qaeda has built up over the years. They’re developing that, and I think that’s something to look for in terms of a threat to the United States. One of the reasons why al Qaeda has been so difficult to defeat is that it has that resilience in terms of leadership capital and to be able to share resources.

But the other thing that ISIS brings to the table that I think it’s fundamentally changed the game and we haven’t really discussed much here today has been what it’s done on social media and the mass mobilization of a limited segment of the population, of the radicalized population in pursuit of ISIS and also partially al Qaeda’s objectives.

That’s something that will not be reversed until we’ve reverse the victory narrative that ISIS has crafted. It’s something that will not be slowed until the success on the ground is stopped. And even then I think that we would see it continuing. It will pursue some sort of leaderless form, but it’s going to be very, very difficult to put the lid back on that Pandora’s box online.

These individuals have developed social networks. And we’ve seen from our own sources that it’s very, very hard to stop them. You can’t shut down all the Twitter accounts. They’ve switched to Telegram, a new social media messaging app. They’re adapting, and we need to be able to adapt with them as well as implementing a strong strategy to go after the source.

I just want to conclude by looking at what I think was missing from the conversation last night. And we’re so focused on the threat to the United States that we haven’t actually traced it back to where it comes from.

So it’s the same problem with al Qaeda. When al Qaeda attacked the embassies in 1998, we went after select targets that were generating threats. We didn’t really go after the organization that was generating the full threat. We’ve done that again and again, and now we’re talking about doing that with ISIS. We are going to try and play catch with a machine that is throwing baseballs at us faster than we can think. And we’re not thinking about going after the machine.

We need to destroy the machine on the ground to prevent its ability to reconstitute those threats. Defeating the threat node, defeating the bomb cell that makes the bombs in Yemen, which still exist, or defeating the group sitting in Iraq or elsewhere, in Raqqa, in Syria, planning external attacks against the United States doesn’t defeat the group’s capability to reconstitute that cell.

And that I think is why we continue to face this problem today and why the work that Mary generally has been so groundbreaking in terms of putting out this global strategy to start rolling back the entire movement as a whole.

MR. KAGAN: Thank you, Katie.

All right. Let me open it up to some questions form the audience. Wait for the microphone. State your name. Put your statement in the form of a brief question please. Start over here.

Q: Yes. I’m Russell King. Donald Trump had made a statement that he wants to let Putin bomb anybody he wants to in Syria. And I have some major disagreements with that. I think right now Putin has more than enough breathing room. And so my question to you is how do you assess the Russian bombings in Syria and can we defeat the sabotage agents under jihadi cover and their political bosses without forming a partnership with the Russian Federation?

MR. KAGAN: Thank you for bringing us back to our Soviet roots. I’m going to field that one actually and say the problem that we have is that – we’ve got multiple problems with Putin, starting with that his fundamental overarching objective is to reverse the Cold War defeat. That is his grand strategic objective. He does not accept the Cold War defeat, and he is trying to reverse that outcome globally, which is a bit of a problem for us or should be. So the notion of partnering with someone trying to undo the outcome of the Cold War is a bit problematic in any case.

Our second problem with Putin is that his definition of ISIS is very different from our definition of ISIS. His definition of ISIS – and this is apparent from the maps that you can see that come out of the Russian Defense Ministry showing where ISIS is and what their control zones are, ISIS is virtually every group that opposed the Assad regime according to Putin. He regards the nuanced distinctions that we make between ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra and the opposition groups that we support as fantasy.

And so from his perspective, he’s only bombing ISIS. The trouble is that that’s Putin-world. In the real world, most of his bombs are dropping on non-ISIS targets. And it will be a long time if ever before the Russian air campaign starts to focus on ISIS because what Putin is fundamentally doing is supporting Assad and Assad has a lot of enemies to fight through before he gets to ISIS. And, frankly, we assess that he will run out of steam long before he gets to a point where he actually go after the serious ISIS safe havens. So we have a fundamental problem there.

And then I want to pick up, before I hand over to Mary, who I know has to have a comment about our friends in Moscow, but I want to pick up on something that General Flynn said, which is also very important. If you’re backing Putin, you’re backing Assad. If you’re backing Assad, you are backing the principal driver of radicalization and violence in Syria.

The reason we have ISIS in Syria as it is today is because of the vicious sectarian brutality, massacre, use of starvation as a weapon of war, use of chemical weapons, to this day still dropping barrel bombs on civilian targets, all conducted by the Assad regime. That’s what Putin is backing. If we back Putin, that’s what we’re backing. We can see where that’s gotten us. It’s only going to take us to a worse place if we continue with that.

So we need to separate ourselves from Assad, and that means separating ourselves from Putin and looking at Putin as a problem that we need to control rather than as a potential partner, and understand where our true interests lie.

MS. HABECK: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. And this plays into actually one piece of my earlier presentation, which is if we choose to empower people on the ground, then they’re going to achieve their national security interest, not ours. So we have to be really careful with that.

Do we want to empower Putin? That’s what will happen if we say, go ahead and bomb. And my understanding is, you know, from the Arabic language press that he actually has boots on the ground. So he’s put skin in the game and he believes that that’s going to allow him to make a play for influence and for control in that area of the world.

So I think we have – we have to do more than what we’re doing if we want to have that kind of influence in a country we’ve neglected shamefully for so long.

MR. KAGAN: OK. Go ahead. I know you have a meter running so I’m going to give you your shot.

Q: Great. Thanks very much. I’m Garrett Mitchell. I write the Mitchell Report. And two things: one, I’m soon going to get up and run out the door only because I have a car that will be towed if I don’t.

And the second is that some years ago, when Fred and General Keane and others were promulgating all of their thinking on the surge – as Fred well knows, I attended almost every session in various think tanks and came to the conclusion that they were wrong. And so I have subsequently learned to pay very close attention to Fred when he has some ideas.

I want to come back to a point that General Flynn made, a seemingly small one but I want to get your sense of how large this problem is potential. It’s a question of language.

He used the example of Afghanis, which is (money ?), and Afghans who are people. But I want to go to the more central one in this case which is we have at least one candidate who says if he isn’t willing to call it, you know, he can’t know what he’s talking about.

And, by the same token, we have on the other side of the equation Hillary Clinton who is saying the language is important and that, therefore, we should call this, you know, jihadism or radical jihadism and leave the word Islam out of it.

So my question is – and I think it was in Seth’s remarks when he talked about the importance of the relationship between territory and narrative – this is a question about language and narrative.

And so I’m interested to know, A, what you think about the advisability of using the word Islam in any of those sort of typically three-word descriptors. And, second, whether the accusations that it is – that it plays into the hands of ISIS and al Qaeda and their narrative has substance to it.

MR. KAGAN: Great.

Q: Thanks.

MR. KAGAN: Who wants to take that? Mary?

MS. HABECK: I’ll take it. So I think this is one of those places where otherwise in agreement with a lot of things that he had to say about our need for long-term thinking, about generational problem, about the problems the U.S. has with sort of thinking strategically, I found myself nodding my head.

But when it came to the issue of what’s the relationship between the problems that we’re facing and what I always call ordinary Islam, I found myself not in agreement with what he had to say.

So I think 1.6 billion people, a religion that’s so diverse, you can’t understand it after 10 years of study, let alone, you know, after – well, actually, come to think of it, I’ve been studying this –

MR. KAGAN: A long time. A long time.

MS. HABECK: OK. So in 17, 17 years. Seventeen years. That was my original interest was actually Islam.

And the conclusion I came to very early on is that this is a fight over Islam. This is a fight over who gets to control the future of Islam. And up until the mid-1970s, that fight had been won by the liberals and the modernists and people who wanted to have a secular vision for the Middle East.

I mean, all the countries that we’re interested in today were founded as secular countries, right? Whether it was Turkey, you know, Iraq, Syria, you name it, they were – Pakistan, they were founded with Islam sort of somewhere in the background as the inspiration for morality, for ethics, and for culture. But they were founded as secular countries with the separation between religion and the state.

And the fight that’s going on right now that started back in the 19th century, which the Islamists lost for 70 years, they’ve know – they’ve simply outlasted the secularists and they’re imposing their vision on really unwilling Muslims around the world.

So I have a lot of trouble with saying this is – you know, the problem is Islam because it’s really in some ways a kind of reformation or enlightenment fight that’s going on about who is going to control the future of the religion. And I think by using term Islam, full stop, we empower the radicals and take away the power from the liberals and the secularists who would like to have that kind of peaceful future for their religion.

MR. KAGAN: Seth?

MR. JONES: Yeah. Just two brief comments. I mean, I think this is a good question and it’s one that we sometimes dance around. But I think one is it is important to understand what these organizations say and advocate. And whether it’s al Qaeda, whether it’s ISIS, whether it’s a range of their affiliates, they are advocating an extreme version of Islam and they’re advocating the establishment of an extreme version of Sharia in areas they control. And we can see that.

I mean, if you – if you want to understand the vision of al Qaeda, one place to go is to ready the words today of Zawahiri among others or of al-Baghdadi. It is a religious interpretation, and that is an important component.

At the same time, it is also worth understanding in any of these countries we’re talking about, whether it’s Afghanistan or Pakistan or Libya or Somalia or Yemen, there is a very serious struggle going on about religion.

So what you saw after the famine in 2011 and ’12 in Somalia is many – most, virtually all Somali Muslims did not subscribe to al-Shabaab’s ideology. And that was a critical ingredient to pushing them back for territories. It was a critical ingredient back in 2009 during the awakening and then during the surge. And it came from Sunnis in Anbar.

So I think it is also important to understand – or even if you look at the somewhat successful French operations at least early on in Mali, there were a number of Muslims in Mali that stood up against the extremists – the Islamic extremists.

So I guess that’s a somewhat longhand way of saying that, one, religion is obviously important to them, to their vision and to their governance apparatus, but, two, it is also a struggle within these countries between Muslim populations.

And the violence levels – we often think even on the sectarian dimension that they’re strongest between Sunni and Shia. But within a range of countries including Iraq, the Sunni on Sunni violence is extraordinary and so it helps you appreciate the complexity of religion in these countries.

MR. KAGAN: George, it’s an incredibly important question. I’m really glad that you asked it. It’s something that has to be approached with nuance in a political atmosphere that hates nuance. And this is – no, this is the problem that we have.

Is it Islamist? Yes. It is Islamist. It is a radical form of violent Islamism. In my opinion as a non-Islamic scholar, it appears to me to be a descendent of a heresy that formed in the early stages of Islam with the (heretics ?) who killed Ali. It is in that – in my interpretation, therefore, it is a heresy that reemerged every few hundred years within Islam. It is a heresy and it is defeated every time by the mainstream Muslim community, and I have no doubt that it will be defeated again on this rise. If you refuse to recognize that it is a heresy within Islam and that it is playing with Islam, you have no chance of understanding it.

So one of the reasons why we have articulated the strategy we have is because we see the struggle as an insurgency within the Muslim community. Al Qaeda defines itself that way. It defines itself as the vanguard of a revolutionary struggle, the aim of which is to take control by force of the Muslim community and bring it to a path that they regard as righteous but that the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not regard as righteous.

We have skin in this game because we’re one of the enemies that that revolutionary vanguard has identified and because it would be a disaster for us if it continued to gain strength.

So we are in the position of assisting a counterinsurgency within the Muslim world writ large. And that’s really the framework from which we approach the strategy that we’re presenting, how best do we go about assisting the Muslim community to put down this extremely violent and skilled insurgency.

But if you’re not prepared to say that it has anything to do with Islam, you won’t understand it. If you say that the problem is Islam, then you also don’t understand it, and you’re lining yourself up against 1.6 billion Muslims.

And even if that were the case, I would submit that it would be desirable to try to think about ways of approaching upon it before you get to deciding that you’re at war with 1.6 billion people. But, in point of fact, we shouldn’t be and we aren’t. And I think that’s the nuance, again, and it’s just so hard to get nuance over in the circumstance as it is. But that’s what we’re going to have to find a way to do that. So thank you for raising that question.

OK. Sir.

Q: My name is Richard Griffin. I thank you for your report here which is entitled “A Global Strategy.” I believe, Fred, you also used the term grand strategy. There’s been a lot of loose talk in the media, the administration, other places about strategies, this kind of strategy, that kind of strategy but not much talk about objectives, what it is we want the strategies to accomplish. And I recognize that it’s a very complicated, complex involved question but would you say something about objectives?

MR. KAGAN: I’m happy to because I actually think the objectives are the simple part. Our objectives are securing the American people, protecting the American homeland, preserving our way of life, and supporting an international order that is required in order for us to continue to be safe, secure, prosperous, and live according to our values. That is the objective. Everything else flows from that.

And we can talk about secondary objectives and various things and the desirability of spreading democracy, which I believe the desirability of spread representative government is a good thing.

Humanitarian concerns – I think it is an outrage that we have watched hundreds of thousands of Syrians brutally murdered and taken the position that it’s none of our business. I think that is an absolutely moral outrage but it is not central to the discussion that we’re having right now because the fact of the matter is that the security of the American homeland and the survival of the American way of life is in question. And in that circumstance, we must focus on that. And that is the entirety of the objective that we considered as we laid out this strategy and as we are focusing on this now.

Now, we think that this has to be performed in a way that preserves our values, that advances our other interests rather than harming them and so forth, but that’s it. The question is purely and simply what do we need to do to protect the American people, the American homeland and the American way of life and support an international order now seriously under threat that we require in order to live as Americans. This is the beginning of that strategy in our view. But that’s the objective. You’d like to add?

MS. HABECK: We lay out a specific end state that we would like to see al Qaeda and ISIS brought to. We think the only end state that allows us to achieve this objective is to make them what they were back in the late 1980s. That is a small, tiny, secretive terrorist group that could carry out local attacks, and that’s it.

We want their message, their vision, their ideology to be so marginalized and so unpalatable to the Muslim majority world that nobody is attracted to it or a very few people are attracted to it. And we want to see their control of territory loosened and then basically force back down that spectrum from insurgency down to a tiny little terrorist group again.

MR. KAGAN: OK. Over here and then – let’s try to get in two questions quickly. So, actually, let me take the two questions. We’ll go here and then we’ll go to Saad (ph).

Q: Yeah. Fast question. My name is Andy Stewart (sp). I used to work for General Flynn, now in the private sector. Something that I’m not hearing in this is really what to do about the Sunni Arab populations. ISIL seems to offer a solution for them. In Iraq, the Sunni Arabs used to run the place. When we came in and toppled them, we essentially marginalized them under a different sect, the Shia. So –

MR. KAGAN: How do we get the Sunnis back?

Q: Can we argue that, you know, ISIL’s grip on this is not only faith but it’s also offering self-determination for these people? How do we go after that, because the answer often comes down to changing the borders? And that seems to be a problem for us.

MR. KAGAN: Yeah. That’s a terrific question.

Saad.

Q: Yeah. I’m Saad Dumi (ph) with the American Enterprise Institute. Thank you for this, you know, really fascinating set of presentations.

My question comes back to the idea of the scale of the problem. I think that everyone is in obvious agreement that no one is at war with 1.6 billion Muslims but there are very widely varying numbers of how many people we are in fact at war with. And recently, Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation in London came up with some estimates and I’d like to sort of see if they seem around accurate to you.

He said of the 1.6 billion, 400 million are Islamists, not necessarily violent but people who believe that life should be lived by Sharia, and of that 400 million, about 10 percent or 40 million people are in fact jihadists. Is that something that seems – are we talking about the scale of the problem that’s roughly that large or does that strike you as being a little bit too large?

MR. KAGAN: OK. So we have how do we deal with the Sunni problem and how many people are involved in this in two minutes. Who wants to take that? Katie?

MS. ZIMMERMAN: I think the question of how to deal with the Sunni problem is one that is a little bit unique to Iraq and Syria when you’re looking at the sectarian issues.

We tend to see things in sectarian light because that’s how the power lines fall. And, you know, the conflict in Yemen is not sectarian. Yes, there are Zaydi Shia and Sunni and they’re on opposite side and they’re fighting but they’re fundamentally fighting over political power and the ability to define how wealth is distributed. They didn’t define themselves off at the start as Sunni or Shia. The fight in Somalia is not sectarian because the Sunni – it is Sunni.

When you start looking through this and when you try to re-empower just one faction of the population, you start doing the opposite, where the minority, the Shia, the Alawites, et cetera, start to feel the same way and they will revert to a violent part. I think part of the strength of the strategy is that it’s not – it’s not trying to separate out Sunni from Shia from other Muslims.

The idea is to create a system of governance that is representative of all of the interest groups and one that is seen as legitimate by all of the interest groups. We haven’t done that. We didn’t do that in Iraq well and that’s why you saw the friction coming out that led to the return of ISIS.

And I think that it really is a question not just of how to think about but how to go after representative governance and not empowering certain groups.

MS. HABECK: So yeah. I love the work the Quilliam Foundation is doing. I love Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz. I think they’re doing great stuff. But I do find myself in disagreement with that number because if you look at who is actually fighting with both groups – OK.

So first of all, you have some numbers I should just throw out there. The head of DNI in our country, Clapper, last year in a public speech said there are 2,200 militant groups in Syria. So 2,200, only two of them are ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra and then other groups that are sort of affiliated with them more or less or some groups that have nothing to do with them at all – 2,200.

So there’s a lot of Jihadist energy out there that has nothing to do with al Qaeda and ISIS. And you can take a look at Libya and have the same sort of situation going on there.

But I disagree with those numbers just sort on a global basis because if you do a sort of net assessment, what you come up with al Qaeda and ISIS, who are obviously the two biggest ones and probably have about 50 percent of the energy in the – something more like 0.025 percent so hundreds of thousands of people are actually fighting for them. Now they have in some cases a population support base.

So, right now, ISIS is controlling the lives of at least 10 million people just in Iraq and Syria. Al Qaeda is controlling the people’s lives in Yemen, in Libya, in a lot of other places as well where they have territory that they more or less manage.

But those people in those territories are not necessarily supporters of theirs. A lot of cases, they’re being sort of murdered and intimidated into supporting them and they’re being forced to do things. And we know this because there’s been multiple uprisings against them that have been brutally by ISIS.

Al Qaeda had the same problem in Anbar province, and it was in fact Sunnis that helped to kick them out in Anbar province and elsewhere. So I actually think that they probably have a serious problem with ISIS today. And I just saw a figure of 1,700 Sunnis murdered – you know, executed by ISIS in Anbar province just recently. So they actually have I think problems with them and it’s not, you know, 100-percent support for these guys either.

But they are able to put pressure on them. And it’s like, you know, do what we saw or else we’ll shoot you and we’ll destroy your family and your home and everything else. And people find themselves with, you know, the awful choice of joining up with these guys or, you know, dying.

MR. KAGAN: And I’ve been acting as if this ended at 4:00 p.m. but I guess we have until 4:30 p.m. actually. So we’ll have time for more questions and discussions. Seth, did you want to chime in on this?

MR. JONES: Yeah. I just wanted to briefly comment on – it’s a good question. I went through their process a little bit – one of the reports I mentioned earlier, trying to at least count the number of fighters for Salafi jihadist groups, which included – it’s not an easy thing to do and you get these wild variations of lows and highs. And that’s just fighters.

And then, when you try to throw in the number of people who aren’t card carrying members but who may sympathize on social media or other – you start getting into wide swings in numbers.

I mean, my effort down that road suggests that we’ve got to be really careful when we deal with numbers. And I’ve got numbers which I can talk to you afterwards on operatives. But even there, I had some big swings and lows and highs.

I mean, I can’t tell how many times I went looking for the number of Taliban or Haqqani members. You’ve probably done that too. And found even with the best U.S. intelligence we have wide swings in numbers that actually change day to day, month to month, year to year. I mean, it’s a relatively small percentage. And I’m happy to give you the data and all the spreadsheets we used after this.

MS. HABECK: Yeah, but the important here for me is the military when you study irregular war is you shouldn’t imagine that they have to have 51 percent support in order to, you know, be successful. All you have to have is about 5 percent of the population on your side to have a successful insurgency so in some of these countries, they probably do have 5 to 10 percent of the population on their side, and that’s why they’re seeing so much success. In other countries, they don’t even have – they have nothing like that number, like Indonesia or other places like that. And so they’re not seeing that kind of success.

MR. KAGAN: I’m very allergic to all these numbers as Seth – for the reasons that Seth articulated because every time I’ve watched any kind of drill with the U.S. intelligence in theaters trying to figure out how many fighters there are in the battlefield, that’s almost a fool’s errand.

And when you start asking questions about whether people support political Islamism and so forth, among other things, you immediately run into the problem of definitions. Who’s a political Islamist to you and what band are you going to capture?

But the main point that I want to add to this is we mustn’t imagine that for the majority of these people, these are labels that they staple onto their foreheads and that don’t change. The fact of the matter is that people will identify – you know, we are talking about human beings here.

And Americans change their minds all the time about am I a Democrat, am I a Republican, am I an independent? I believe the majority of Americans wisely identify themselves as independents at this point. They swing back and forth. Most people in the Muslim world do that also. And it depends on a lot of factors, whether they’re gaining support or losing support.

One of the factors that’s most important, and I don’t want to lose this point, is whether it looks like they’re – these guys are winning or not because one of the characteristics of Sunni Islam as distinction from Shi’ism and from certain Catholic – or certain not Catholic – certain other sects or religions is that there’s an instinctive belief that a group that is doing well in the world has Allah’s blessing. And there’s an instinctive belief that a group that is doing badly does not have Allah’s blessing.

And so if you are a devout religious Sunni Muslim and you watch these groups prospering, you have to begin to ask yourself, are they on to something? Do they have something there?

Which is why our willingness to allow them to continue to have very obvious worldly success while we have arguments with ourselves about whether it’s successful or not, I don’t think that’s an argument that we’re going to spin – you know, I don’t think the Oval Office speech last night persuaded a lot of people in Iraq and Syria that ISIS and al Qaeda are losing.

And the problem is that as we allow these groups to win visibly, we also strengthen their religious credentials, which is not just a Muslim phenomenon after all. How did we defeat communism? Did we? Well, yeah. There are only really two, three communist governments remaining if you want to count China, which calls itself communist but has now become an interesting blend, North Korea, which is completely insane, and the Castro regime.

And that’s about – how did that happen, because communism became equated with the Soviet Union in a way that this particular ideology I would submit is largely equated now with al Qaeda and ISIS. And when the Soviet Union was visibly and obviously defeated, the ideology was fundamentally discredited for that time.

So we can’t separate the ideological fight here from the practical fight and how are they doing on the ground because it affects these numbers of who believe what at any given time.

Q: Yeah. My name is Li Yung (ph). I’ve tried to find some answer to see if you can help me understand the whole situation. I just wonder why American involvement in the war and they label some people as terrorist while they ignore domestic, some kind of effort, some kind of conflict is not – (inaudible).

And I just wonder, in your opinion, what’s the percentage of intelligence about foreign countries is really – (inaudible) – or that is only – (inaudible) – rumor and propaganda creates some stories.

MR. KAGAN: So the question is how well do we actually understand what’s going on? That’s a great question. Who would like to take that?

MS. ZIMMERMAN: I can take it.

MR. KAGAN: Katie, you want to talk a little bit?

MS. ZIMMERMAN: Sure. So actually working on the Critical Threats Project with Fred for the past six years, it’s been revolutionary in how much information we have on the open source. A lot has to do with social media and our brilliant intern, (Dean ?).

But it really is the ability to validate information because we see pictures and video of what’s going on. There are first-hand accounts on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter that are put out. And you can develop reliable sourcing based on how the information plays every time, et cetera. So you start to develop a sense for how the information streams are going.

I think that the idea that we have no concept of what’s happening on the ground is one that’s simply a fallacy. And the intelligence community is coming around to the sense that the open source is really a great wealth of information in which analysts can live and understand and make broad, sometimes very concise assessments of what’s happening.

You know, I will retell the story that I’ve told many times, but I had a roundtable on Yemen in 2011. It was mid-May, and it was right after the first strike against Anwar al-Awlaki that missed him. So if you recall, we killed bin Laden and after that, there was a trove of informatoin and there was a series of rapid action – direct action air strikes against operatives. Awlaki was targeted.

And I sat there at this roundtable and explained and said, well, you know, we fired a missile at this truck and, unfortunately, the missile missed the truck. We tried again and the truck kept going. And then we hit the truck about 30 minutes later but Awalaki had switched cards with these two cousins so we killed the wrong guys.

And I remember looking over and there was an intel analyst down from Tampa or I guess up from Tampa there and his job was just on the ground. And he looks at me, he’s like, that information is classified. How do you have it? And I said, oh, it’s on Twitter.

And the ability to collect this information has let us develop very refined assessments of where these groups are, how they’re operating, how we’re actually affecting them on the ground.

And it’s why I’m quite comfortable when I make recommendations and say, you know, we can focus all we want on countering violent extremism. The CDE (ph) messaging that we’re doing doesn’t do any good for the local fighters. They don’t like the Islam that’s being preached. They’re not being brought along on ideological lines. They’re bought along because the insurgents have created conditions in which they need to opt in to the insurgency, as Mary pointed out.

So I think we do have a very good sense of what’s happening on the ground from open source.

MR. KAGAN: Seth.

MR. JONES: Yeah. I agree. I do think the one area we often find challenging, and it goes back to a paper General Flynn was an author on a couple of years ago, is understanding the local dynamics within the countries they’re operating.

So my two cents is that we can put together pretty good pictures both on the open source side and on the classified side of groups, the networks they’re operating, in some cases, you know, where they’re getting their fundraising from, where they’re getting weapons from, whether they’re involved in propaganda.

But when it comes to them operating in those countries, understanding the complex in Somalia clan dynamics down in the south, the tribal networks in Yemen, ones that are evolving quickly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the tribal dynamics that are hopelessly complicated as you go from Durrani areas in the south to Ghilzai areas in the east, that’s where I think we’ve had challenge is stepping into areas, understanding what we call the red side, taking action without understanding well everything else that’s going on in the country. So I would say that’s the area we’ve got to increasingly better understand and work with a range of locals that do have that understanding.

In fact, one of my most interesting conversations recently out in East Africa was with the Kenyans operating in the south. They live there. So if you want a good briefing from someone, an intel analyst, on what’s going on around the Kenyan-Somali border, you get a briefing from people who live down there. And it’s a level of understanding and detail that’s generational, that, you know, setting somebody up at an intel shop for a couple of years in the U.S. is not going to get. So I think that’s where we have the biggest challenge.

MR. KAGAN: And I think the biggest single challenge we have there is an unwillingness to recognize that we’re going to be doing this for a long time because this is the kind of knowledge and understanding – we have a lot of people who got all, you know, neck deep in the politics of sub-tribal issues in Paktia province, in Ghazni province in Kandahar and Anbar and so forth. Have we captured that? No. We haven’t. We tend to recycle them. We move them. We stood up AFPAKs, we stand down AFPAKs.

If we once recognize that this is actually a multi-generational problem and we set ourselves the task of building on a knowledge, capturing the local knowledge that we can achieve, building on that, spreading it, making it available, we’re constantly going to run into situations we haven’t seen before and dynamics that we’re not familiar with. But we can be a learning and adaptive organization country and build this understanding and make fewer of those mistakes.

Unfortunately, as we’re sort of fighting this war one year at a time and going through a collective amnesia at the end of every cycle, we’re making much worse a problem that I think we could be getting better at, although, of course, what you say is always going to be an issue for us.

Q: Hi. Thank you very much. Really fascinating panel. My name is Chuck Woolery. I’m a former chair of the United Nations Association Council of Organizations. And recently, in the summer, there was a report, a new report, released by Madeleine Albright – she was a co-chair – called The Commission on Global Security, Justice and Governance.

And I was curious if you had researched that or read that or any relationship to how it relates because it does focus on this problem with several other security threats we face if you have any feedback on that.

MS. HABECK: Sorry, I haven’t read it.

MS. ZIMMERMAN: I haven’t read it.

MS. HABECK: I’m afraid I can’t comment on that.

MR. KAGAN: I haven’t either. OK. Yeah.

Q: Thank you. Claire Griffin. I’m an independent consultant. In both your comments and the report, you make reference to creating and then fostering close partnerships with nation states, groups, et cetera. To some people, that might sound suspiciously like leading from behind, but I’m sure that’s not what you meant. So could you elaborate a little bit on these partnerships that you envision?

MR. KAGAN: We certainly don’t mean –

MR. JONES: Lead from the front and answer.

MR. KAGAN: I’ll lead from the front? OK. No, we don’t mean to be leading from behind. There is a problematic dichotomy in our discourse that suggests that you either have 160,000 troops on the ground and you own the place or else you’re just sort of, you know, working through local partners and you’re doing whatever they want to do and you’re hoping in the generally right direction.

And it’s a dichotomy frankly that the president has been aggressively reinforcing by continually accusing anyone who advocates doing something more muscular than what he wants to do of wanting to re-invade Iraq.

The truth of the matter is I don’t know anybody who’s actually advocating reinvading Iraq. And I don’t know anyone, even Senator Lindsay Graham who is well- known to be way out there, and I’m a huge fan on the whole, his way out there suggestion is 10,000 troops. We had 165,000 troops in Iraq at the height of the surge. We’re not talking about those kinds of numbers. So we need to start by throwing that out the window.

Now, we recognize in our report two things about those kinds of force levels. First of all, it is conceivable that threats could emerge that are so urgent and so dire and there are so few alternatives that we might have to go back in with a large intervention and undertake to eliminate a major threat to the United States.

We also recognize and state very loudly it is highly undesirable for the United States to do that and it is highly desirable instead for us to pursue every possible strategy to avoid getting to the point where that would be necessary.

Now, we believe that the United States provides critical or can provide critical enablers of all varieties, unique enablers that no other state can provide, including the Russians, including our NATO allies, including the Iranians to forces that are willing and interested to fight against common enemies.

You can use that ability – and that is going to include some boots on the ground. I mean, this is the other thing is we keep having this discussion about boots on the ground, which has led ISIS, I believe, to describe what we’re doing in Iraq as the footless war because we don’t have any boots on the ground and it’s evidence of how sophisticated they are honestly in terms of messaging that that it’s quite a good talking point for them. We’re going to have to have boots on the ground for all of the reasons that Seth identified.

In general terms, we’re not going to want to have combat brigades on their own with some limited partnership with a handful of forces that we can find to put an Iraqi face on things as we were doing previously in Iraq at times, doing most of the fighting. That’s not desirable.

But if you use the leverage that your ability to provide asymmetric capabilities to your partners provides, you can lead and indeed lead from the front without owning the entire fight. And that’s in general terms I would say the course of action that we’re trying to recommend here because this isn’t and can’t be simply a matter of empowering whatever local partners we can find to do whatever they’re going to do.

I think Egypt provides a classic example of that. I am highly nervous about the prospect of simply empowering Sisi to go after ISIS because Sisi’s real concern is not ISIS. It’s the Muslim Brotherhood, by which he means a very large portion of his population. That’s not our enemy. And I’m afraid that the kinds of approaches that Sisi would take to deal with that would make the situation much worse from our perspective. So what do we do? Do we not support him? No. We do have to support him because he is fighting ISIS. There is a significant ISIS cell in Sinai and elsewhere in Egypt.

So what do we do? Our support to him can be leveraged. Our support to him can be leveraged to try to, let us say, help him understand the problem in a somewhat more nuanced way and to try to rein in instincts that he might have that we think would be problematic. That’s not leading from behind. Leading from behind is here, here’s some stuff, go at it.

So I think there’s a balance there. It’s a very, very good question. It’s a very important issue. And, again, I think we need to move away from a hyper-partisan sort of – you know, attack debate and discourse here to something that has an appropriate level of nuance, which is what we’re trying to do.

MR. JONES: Just to highlight some cases. I think where this has been done well and where this hasn’t, 2001, after the September 11th attacks, the United States, the U.S. roles in Afghanistan was actually quite minimal. It was an air campaign, very limited boots on the ground, just over 100 special operations and CIA forces. Leveraging locals, Northern Alliance, Pashtun tribes in the east and south, but set an objective, put together a strategy, achieved an end result of overthrowing the Taliban regime that had harbored al Qaeda. It was done with a pretty significant – in fact, the largest number of boots on the ground were all entirely local.

That’s a good example I think of where we have a – where we’re leading the effort but a lot of the fighting may not be done by us but we’re deeply involved in a whole range of things, including coordinating.

On the other side of the spectrum, since the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, no one’s leading. So we have no European, no U.S., no neighbors taking a leadership role in coordinating anything. And what do we get when we don’t have leadership in a place like Libya? It has become the biggest sanctuary for jihadist groups in North Africa, possibly in Africa writ large. Virtually everybody that has any small number of Salafi Jihadist cells has got a sanctuary somewhere in Libya. There’s your example of where a lack of leadership gets you.

MR. KAGAN: I’m going to hand it to Mary in a second. But I actually want to argue with you just a little bit because we’ve had no disagreement on this panel so far. And that’s –

MR. JONES: Good. I welcome it.

MR. KAGAN: It’s better to have a little bit of disagreement. But it also I think is a way of showing exactly the kind of nuance.

I actually think we made a mistake in 2001 in going in too light because I think we missed an opportunity to catch al Qaeda, an al Qaeda organization that had actually deployed into a fielded military force in a very foolish way and we relied on partners to try to stop it who were not in fact interested primarily in stopping it.

And I would have preferred to have seen an American force, and I’ll talk in a minute about the size of the force that I would have preferred to see, setting up a catcher’s mitt south of Kabul to catch these guys before they made it into the mountains on the border and created the situation where we had to keep chasing them. And I think we could have done that.

I also would have wanted an American force to prevent the Northern Alliance from simply marching into Kabul and taking control of the capital, which we identified at the time as being not in our interest, and rightly so because the fact of the matter is that set us up for an immediate Pashtun fear that we were installing a Northern Alliance government, which is sort of what we were doing for a little while. And I think that it would have been better to mitigate that with an American presence, rather than just having the Northern Alliance march on in.

What’s the kind of force I’m talking about putting in there? Five, ten thousand troops – that’s the level of argument that we’re engaged in. I’m talking about wanting to put – you know, I would have wanted to put in three or four battalions. You know, could have been Marines, could have been airborne, you know, light forces fundamentally, with a lot of air power, to give us some presence on the ground. But that’s the kind of disagreement that we would have had. No one was interested in putting 150,000 troops in Afghanistan at the time.

So I agree entirely with your point, obviously, that was we did in Afghanistan was infinitely better than what we did in Libya. We can disagree around the margins about what we did in Afghanistan, but it’s still margins within the context of leading from the front and being in control of the situation. You can have at me if you want to.

MR. JONES: Well, no. I would say my have at you is in “The Graveyard of Empires,” if you haven’t read it, I do actually argue once the government was overthrown, we should have had more forces on the ground to stabilize the country. But I’d rather not bring everybody into an Afghan-Pakistan fight back in 2001. So I’ll hand it over to Mary. We’ll do it out in the lobby after the event.

MR. KAGAN: We’ll sell tickets.

MS. HABECK: I think this discussion though has raised one of the major objections as somebody might raise to this entire, you know, concept of American boots on the ground, which is doesn’t that just radicalize entire populations against us and make the problem worse instead of better?

I had this very, very interesting conversation this summer with an unnamed person who had just left the Obama administration. He said, we went in heavy in Iraq and it turned into a mess. We went light into Libya, and it turned into a mess. And we basically did nothing at all in Syria, and it turned into a mess. And so he kind of shrugged his shoulders, you know, like what can we be doing about it? You know, like we were doing everything we can and it just seems like everything we do turns into a mess.

Well, the truth is there is a similarity between all three of those situations and that is the enemy. So maybe it’s not about us at all but the way that the enemy is taking advantage of our missteps.

So in Iraq, they were saying, the messaging was, hey, we’re occupied. And, by the way, they had our support for that because one of the first things that American leaders said is, we’re carrying out an occupation.

And then, in Libya, we just decapitated the regime and then we forgot the pottery barn rule that was, you know, so prominent back in 2003-2004, if you break it, you own it, right? And we just said, hey, go ahead and do whatever.

A lot of people don’t know this but after the Benghazi attack on our embassy or consulate, there was a massive demonstration in support of the United States on the day afterward in Benghazi, like 10,000 people demonstrated in favor of the United States and what they had done for the U.S., not well reported in the U.S. What happened though to the organizers of that? Well, guess what? They all ended up getting murdered and assassinated, and all of our supporters, one by one, we just deserted them.

And so that’s – you know, they took advantage of our misstep there. And the misstep we made in Syria, the messaging that’s being put out consistently by the jihadists is they obviously hate you because they’re allowing Assad to just slaughter you and they’re doing nothing about it. So maybe it’s, you know, not so much what we’ve done as our missteps in each one of these case that we have a very clever enemy that’s taken advantage of it.

MR. KAGAN: OK. Ben, last question.

Q: Yeah. Ben Collins (sp). So I mean, I think we keep talking about a lot of this in very big strategic terms but I think the core of it comes down to trust, right, because, you know, Fred, you remember, and, Seth, you’ve got a lot of experience of this as well.

At the end of the day, at least in Anbar and places in Afghanistan, right, I mean, it’s a counterinsurgency principle, it was time, right, like the things that you brought up with diplomatic information, military, all that. You know, we figured that out by spending time, right? I mean, days and days and days and building trust with these people, right?

Because you’re right. I think you said at the end of the day, it’s like is the new boss better or worse than the old boss? I mean, most of these people just want to live their lives and if you can offer them a solution, you know, or you can offer a peaceful alternative – I want to walk my kid to school, right, I want to have power and water and not be scared all the time.

And the only way we got that was, you know, at least during the awakening with the Sons of Iraq was they trusted us, right? And that took time. I mean, it wasn’t like strategic thought and analysts that were handing us papers saying, look, here are the economic realities of the town. It’s because I knew it. I figured it out because I spent months and months and we got to know these people.

So, in effect, there is going to have to be I think this dramatic military incursion in certainly the heartlands of Raqqa and Mosul, and those are going to be painful. But this concept of how we are we going to change this dynamic, I haven’t yet heard it from the president, but I’m still trying to figure out who’s going to give that kind of legitimate governance solution, right? Who are they going to trust moving forward?

It’s going to take a hammer but until we solve the rest of it, and hopefully, we’ll get there, but if you’ve got some ideas, who’s going to be that force that’s actually going to be able to build that trust?

MR. KAGAN: OK. Now we really do have about a minute to answer this. So want to take a swing at it?

MS. ZIMMERMAN: I think that there is still hope for the trust to be there. It’s seen in every single example of when the conflict starts, the people look to the United States for leadership. And, you know, you have foreign leaders coming to us. You have youth activists, political leaders shopping around town, and that’s where understanding the local dynamics actually comes into play.

But they do come to the United States and say, help us. You know, here’s our case. We’re trying to fight for this. And the question there is whether the U.S. is willing to lead that fight.

You know, when it comes down to the day-to-day trust, are we going to stay in the fight? Are we going to support our allies, et cetera? I think, you know, today, unfortunately, it’s been a little bit more degraded. It’s been a trite saying from folks studying the Middle East that it’s better to be the U.S. – an enemy or an adversary of the United States than our friend based on how we’ve been treating them. And I think that’s a very big cause for concern. Many of our partners, historic partners, partners with strategic objectives that align with ours feel abandoned by the United States.

And that’s why, you know, part of the report is actually calling for a shift in how we’re treating those partners and how we’re engaging with them, not just outsourcing the problems to them but actually engaging and trying to show a longer term commitment.

MR. KAGAN: I want to end this on a more optimistic note because it’s easy to get depressed looking at this problem.

We’ve done a lot of damage to our credibility in the world generally and in this part of the world in particular. But it not historically the case that it is better to be the enemy of the United States than to be the friend of the United States, and there’s a long list of countries and peoples that you can ask who made themselves the enemies of the United States and did not end up happy at the end of that experience.

We are very focused on our recent experiences and the difficulties that we have had and it has fed into this narrative of hopelessness and doom and the belief that everything we do will be bad and wrong and fail and that we can’t do anything right in the world.

We have certainly made mistakes over the past couple of decades. We have certainly done things that have caused a lot of problems and a lot of pain for ourselves and for other people. We have also had some successes over the past couple of decades.

But if you take a longer view of that and you ask yourself, is it really fair to say that the United States is not capable of helping local people overcome evil regimes and establish good, stable regimes that remain legitimate and have positive values and make a positive contribution to the international environment over the long term, ask the people of Germany if that’s true. Ask the people of Japan if that’s true. Ask the people of South Korea if that’s true.

Ask the inhabitants of the Balkans whether it is the case that every American intervention creates more bloodshed, violence, and instability. I don’t want to hold up the Balkans as a perfect situation. It’s very far from being a perfect situation.

But the fact of the matter is that we went from a situation of open warfare and mass genocide to a situation where by and large, the problems are being resolved in a peaceful and diplomatic fashion, and we do not have genocide; we do not have mass violence.

And we have had American forces, ground forces in the Balkans since 1995. We are capable of making a positive difference, even in incredibly complicated situations. And, I mean, for heaven’s sake, if you look at the Balkans and think, well, that was easy, all I can say is you don’t know anything about the Balkans. It was not.

So we can succeed at the micro-level, at the macro-level. We can as a nation keep an idea in our heads for more than one administration at a time. Look at the experience of the Cold War. We are capable of fighting a multi-generational struggle. And we are capable of overcoming setbacks and mistakes and succeeding. And I think it’s very important to keep these things in mind as we look at this problem. We can’t whitewash it. It doesn’t help to say, well, let’s just persuade ourselves that it’s all OK.

But neither should we surrender to a doom-and-gloom narrative that says whatever we do, we’re – it’s just hopeless; our day has passed and we’re only going to make things worse because I’m confident that that’s not true. We are hopeful that we have begun a dialogue here to frame an American strategy that can become a Western strategy for helping us succeed in this conflict.

I’m grateful to our panelists for their contributions to the product and to this discussion and to all of you for your very thoughtful questions. Thank you very much for coming. (Applause.)

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