National Public Radio Interview: Author of "Imperial Hubris" discusses US policy failures in the war on terror

RENEE MONTAGNE, host: This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:  And I'm Steve Inskeep.

It's not often that an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency gets so much attention for criticizing his own government. The CIA analyst known as Mike did just that. He authored a book called "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror." He spoke on this program a few weeks ago, but his charges are too detailed and too serious to handle in a single conversation, so we called him again. Mike took a two-hour leave and left the CIA headquarters in Virginia. When he arrived here in Washington, he could give only his first name as he was introduced to people. Mike says the US fought an unnecessary war in Iraq, and he says the US misunderstood the situation in Afghanistan.

MIKE (Author, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror"): The intelligence community as a whole at the senior levels has a contempt for expertise. They're mostly generalists at the senior levels. They haven't had a lot of experience on any one topic, and as far as I could tell from sitting directly in the middle of the events, there was no effort to gather the substantial amount of knowledge the United States government possesses on Afghanistan. And so we went into the war in Afghanistan kind of on a wing and a prayer and a hope that everything would turn out.

INSKEEP: Well, now in Afghanistan, the United States went in with a bombing campaign, with some Special Forces. The Taliban was thrown out quickly, relatively light US casualties. Why shouldn't we think that Afghanistan is going to work out over time?

MIKE: Well, we seem to have a lot of trouble distinguishing between winning a battle and winning a war. We won a battle. We drove the Taliban from the cities, and the Taliban is a rural-based organization, so in many ways, driving them out of the cities, while they didn't want to leave the cities, it helped them.  They didn’t have to provide water services, sewer services, police services.  They reverted, in a sense, to their natural state as insurgents. The same thing with al-Qaeda. So we let the overwhelming mass of fighters with guns go home to their villages and become invisible. And now we're faced with a resurgence of two organizations, the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which were defeated in a battle but have hardly lost the war.   And unfortunately Hamid Karzai has very little credentials that are meaningful in Afghanistan.  He’s associated with a tribe but not of a tribe.  He’s spent several decades overseas in Pakistan or in India or in the United States.  His Islamic credentials are very minimal in the eyes of most Afghans.

INSKEEP:  That’s why Americans like him though.  He’s not an Islamist. 

MIKE:  Exactly.  I think that’s the situation that underlines the tragedy of our understanding of what’s going on in the world.  The Afghans never will accept a foreign occupation whether it’s American, British, or Russian.  And they will never accept a leader who’s put into power on the basis of foreign bayonets.  If history teaches anything it teaches that. And certainly that knowledge would have been available to the president and his advisors before the invasion of Afghanistan if it had been consulted by the intelligence community. 

Letting the Afghans do most of the work didn’t work.  But the U.S. played the only game in town.   We used the remnants of Amid Shah Masoud’s Northern Alliance.  And with them pushed them into taking Kabul, something they never could have done themselves.  They were in essence a defeated organization on the 11^th of September.  The only fighting force that would fight with us, Shia, Tajiks and Usbecks, are ethnic minorities that have never dominatied Afghan politics.  It has traditionally been the the tribes in the South, the Pashtun tribes in the East who have provided the royalty, the government of Afghanistan.   Its beyond proper assumption or even hopefulness that they could have formed a government, let alone a democratic government.  Their installation  in Kabul insured another civil war.  

What choice did United States really have?  We really had only 1 mission…to get rid of bin Laden.  But we didn’t finish the job.  We subcontracted the dirty jobs because we didn’t want to lose our own men.  Winning a war (as opposed to a battle) causes us to lose men.  The men we hired had fought alongside bin Laden against the Soviets.  Afghans will always accept our money. 

INSKEEP: I can hear in my head the voice of Donald Rumsfeld or another forceful advocate of administration policy ticking off things that, from the administration's point of view, are going right in Afghanistan. We've gotten rid of the Taliban, he could say. There's a new government. There's Hamid Karzai who's an ally of the United States. People are moving toward elections. If you were going to summarize the situation in Afghanistan with a few bullet points, what would yours be?

MIKE: That I hope Mr. Karzai gets out alive, that unless we are willing to greatly expand the presence of US and NATO military forces and are willing to take the war to the insurgents, we will eventually come down to the choice of evacuation as the only possible remedy. You know, Afghanistan is a place where tribal loyalties, clan loyalties, family loyalties are paramount.  And I really think you could have 15 or 20 elections and it's basically meaningless, because unless the tribes are satisfied, struggle for power will go on.  Unless the tribes are satisfied, the results of an election will simply be the results of the election.  The tribes have been there for 2000 years.  It will go on.  The problem for the United States is that we haven’t gotten Osama bin Laden.  So we will eventually have to leave, perhaps without getting bin Laden.

INSKEEP: You write not that there could be but that there will be an Islamist regime in charge in Kabul, Afghanistan.

MIKE: Yes.  I think another great fantasy is that we abandoned Afghanistan after the  end of the Soviet Occupation and the end of the Communist government there in 1992.  I think the truth is, the problem was we didn’t abandon them.  We tried to establish a goverment of exiles, former communists, technocrats, etc.  and we tried to marginalize all the men, those who had actually fought the Soviets for 10 years.  People who had lost over 1.5 million in dead and 5 million displaced.

Steve:  But they were Islamic fundamentalists. 

Mike:  Well they were representatives of the dominant tribes and they were gradually becoming fundamentalists.  Afghan Islam at the start of the war with the Soviets was a moderate, very flexible kind of Islam.   It’s only as a result of the war and its exposure to    the broader Islamic world that it has come more into the mainstream of the middle east.   You know, a point I would make is, the Central Intelligence Agency and much of the intelligence community gets blamed for supporting the fundamentalists in the war against the soviets.  The fact is they were the only groups that were shooting.  The groups that the state department or the United Nations wanted to support were people in Gucci suits who spent most of their time in London or Delhi.  The assignment of the intelligence community was to defeat the Soviet Union not to build a new government.  Toward that end we supported people who would fight which was really the only answer to the Soviets.  And so, there’s been a fantasy that’s evolved over the years that somehow the intelligence community or the CIA was operating as a rogue organization. Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth.

INSKEEP: Isn't it possible that a country can change?

MIKE: Absolutely.  They're changing greatly, but the idea that you're going to put 800 years of Anglo-American history on a CD-ROM and give it to Mr. Karzai to install in Afghanistan in a year is really quite madness and it shows among our elites a dramatic ignorance of US history, of how much of a struggle it’s been to get to this stage of our society.  

INSKEEP: Now in this book, which we're discussing for the second time, you not only say the United States misunderstood Afghanistan and that the United States misunderstood Iraq, you also say that the United States fundamentally misunderstood the motivations of al-Qaeda. How so?

MIKE: Absolutely.  There is a genius to bin laden.  And I’ll take flak from anyone for that.  But the man clearly is one of the few men in the 2^nd half of the 20^th century—or women—and into the 21^st, who’s changed history.  He is a great man, not in a qualitative sense for good or bad but as an influence on the flow of modern history.  He has very few peers in the last 50 years.  We’ve misunderstood his genius in focusing on American policies.  We continue to describe him as a gentleman who is out to deny us our freedoms, our liberties, our voting system, our society. 

INSKEEP:  The  standard administration line is:  “They hate freedom.”

MIKE: Yes, and it has been since 1992 or 1988, take your pick. It's a blindness which is bipartisan in nature. They don't like our society clearly. They don't like women going to school and they don't like unveiled women and all those things are true, but very few people in the Islamic world are going to die for that kind of amorphous goal of making sure Americans won't drink Budweiser or something along that line.  The Ayatollah Khomeini tried it, for example, in the Iranian revolution.  He badgered us endlessly for our debauched society but nobody died for the Ayatollah, to stop American society from being American.  Even when we were defeated in Lebanon it was by Hezbollah who clearly believed in the Ayatollah.  But they wanted us off their territory.  The wanted us out of Lebanon.  It wasn’t an attempt to reform our society.

INSKEEP:  They were unhappy with where the United States sent soldiers, what the United States did. 

MIKE:  Yeah.  Another force in the Lebanese territory that they had to contend with…Lebanon is  basically a Hezbollah nationalist oriented organization and their main enemy is Israel. 

INSKEEP: Just to summarize this, I mean, you say that al-Qaeda is unhappy with the United States and gets support in the Islamic world not because of what the United States stands for but because of what the United States does.

MIKE: That's exactly right, and I think for the first time, instead of just taking it from someone like me, the Pew Trust and Gallop and several other polling companies have done, since 2000, a great deal of I think statistically valid polling in Middle Easter countries and it  consistently shows a stark dichotomy.  On the one hand you get overwhelming majorities in the area of 70-75-80% who are deathly opposed to American policy in Islamic world.  And at the same time the same polls show majorities who are appreciative of the equity of American society, of the ability to educate our children, the availability of health care,  and the basic decency of the society.   And bin laden, whether or not intentionally, has played exactly to that divide in the opinion of the Muslim world.

The United States is al-Quaeda’s only indispensable ally.  As long as we pursue the policies that bin Laden has focused on, we will be indispensable, in fact a perfect foil for his activities.  For example, he really has a very limited number complaints but they’re very important in terms of the Muslim world.   Our unqualified support for Israel, our ability to keep oil prices at levels acceptable to the western consumer, our support for countries that oppress Muslims, at least in the eyes of other Muslims.  The Russians in Chechnya, the Chinese in Western China, the Indian government in Kashmir; our support for what bin Laden and others describe as tyrannical, apostate governments from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, whether you’re talking about Syria, or Saudi Arabia, or Algeria.  Our presence on the Arabian Peninsula and now in Iraq, the two holiest places in Islam and our military presence elsewhere in the Islamic world.  He’s focused on all those things and they all appeal to Muslims across the theological spectrum of Islam.  Not that his military martial actions draw the support, but a sympathy for bin Laden’s effort to undo those policies is very wide spread. 

INSKEEP:  People might not support car bombings or blowing up the World Trade Center, but they sympathize with the goals.

MIKE:  I think that’s exactly right.  There’s a genius in divising, if you will, a slate of foreign policy goals that is aimed at undoing those 6 American policies.  And whether it’s a whiskey drinking Pakistani general, or a Salafi missionary in Mindanao.  There is a widespread feeling, for example, that the United States is helping Israel destroy the Palestinians.  Or keeping oil prices low and denying the Muslim world increased revenues.  It’s a very, very difficult position for the United States to be in. 

INSKEEP: Well, so what do you do differently? You don't want to just give in and do what they want.

MIKE: Of course not. It's got to be a combination of things, but right now because we have not recognized that our policies have a role in bin Laden's war aims, but more importantly in his ability to attract support, whether it’s from the prayers in terms of donations or in actual fighters, his room to grow is immense as long as those policies stay in place. And so we’ve got ourselves in a box.  Right now, no one is listening to us in the Muslim world when we protest that our policies are for the good of Muslims or for the good of the world generally, and we have left ourselves only with the military option. I've been criticized in some of the reviews of the book for saying that we needed to apply the military arm of the United States with more force, and I’ve been called a war monger.  Well, I clearly believe we have to increase the use of the military but not because it's either admirable or desirable or just nice to do but because we have no other option.

INSKEEP:  Nothing else will work at this point.

MIKE:  Not at this point.  It’s very hard right now to even get into a discussion of what policy can be to compliment the military.  Its been a long time since we’ve debated, in the United States those policies bin Laden is focused on.  Our policies in the Middle East have been more or less on auto-pilot for the last 20 years, some of them for the last 30 years.  And they’ve become sacrosanct in a sense.  You can ‘t, ah every time we’ve seen, for example, a politician of either party question the position of unqualified support for Israel, he’s immediately pilloried across the nation as an anti-semite, or as someone who’s sympathetic to terrorism.  One of the things we’re undoubtedly going to need to be able to protect our future is some sort of a western energy policy which will lead to self-sufficiency.  But when you suggest drilling in the Arctic reserve, for example, you have a massive protest, which to me looks like they’d rather protect caribou than the American soldiers.  But that’s probably a harsh judgment.   

INSKEEP:  So you want to increase military action.  What does that mean?

MIKE:  It means…you know, when you have an opportunity to attack something you cannot wait until the information you have is perfect.  One of the great tragedies in the 1990’s was the injection of the law enforcement community into the intelligence community.  If you’ll notice, our current leaders very seldom speak in terms of intelligence information.  They now speak in terms of evidence.   And, the result has been that forceful action either covert or military is not taken unless the evidence would be almost acceptable in a court of law.  Well maybe in the criminal procedures that works well.  In the gathering of intelligence where you’re basically stealing information or trying to convince people to commit treason, it’s very unlikely you’re going to get perfect information or information that can be publicized.  And throughout the 1990’s we continued to raise the level of acceptable intelligence to the point where we have had multiple occasions of either trying to capture Osama bin Laden or to let the military take action against him, and we never thought the information was good enough, qualified, perfect enough.  And the truth is, if that’s the standard then the American people will never be protected in the sense that we pre-empt threats to them. 

INSKEEP:  Well let’s be frank about downside.   What you’re suggesting:  drop more bombs, send in more troops, act on flimsier intelligence, make more mistakes, kill more civilians, anger more people in the Islamic world.  

MIKE:  Well there’s the…I think there’s one of the kickers.  I heard, I can’t remember if it was the Director of Central Intelligence or Mr. Clark or one of the secretaries of defense say they were discussing an opportunity to shoot a Cruise Missile at bin Laden at one point.  And they didn’t do so because they were afraid that some of the shrapnel from the missile was going to hit a mosque. 

INSKEEP:  This is the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tennet

MIKE:  And they were afraid that the shrapnel was going to hit a mosque near where bin Laden was targeted.  And that was based on the assumption that we didn’t want to do that because Muslims would be more mad at us.  Well, that decision is kind of clear evidence of the fact that no one has (quite has) a handle on the depth of hatred toward the United States in the Muslim world.  If they think a piece of shrapnel hitting a stone mosque was going to do anything more than marginally increase their hatred for us it’s a mistake.  But more important, I’ve now worked through four investigations of the 911 attack.  I’ve watched my supperiors  go up before the committees, whether the Joint Committee of the Congress, internal committees of the Intelligence Committee, or the Kean Commission; and talk about why the intelligence wasn’t good enough.  And to my great surprise, not one of those congressmen, or senators, or members of the Kean Commission ever said:  “Mr. Director, Mr. Secretary, Mr. Clark…why didn’t you err on side of protecting Americans?”  Why we are always more concerned about not hitting a mosque with shrapnel or perhaps killing an Arab prince.  The world is lousy with Arab princes.  No one ever asked:  “Why don’t you try to protect Americans?”  And that, to me, is the tragedy of these investigations…is that, somehow instead of taking a chance to kill one of the greatest threats to American security, we opted not to hit a stone mosque with a piece of metal shrapnel because it might affect someone’s view. 

INSKEEP:  Well one of the things the United States did was invade Iraq on the chance that it might have weapons of mass destruction and that they might end up in the hands of terrorists and that’s ended up having tremendous cost to the United States in a lot of peoples’ viewpoints.

MIKE:  Oh I think that’s exactly right.  And I agree.  In my book I opposed the Iraq war simply because I think aggressive offensive war is indefensible.  I compared it to the war against Mexico in 1846.  And Ullysses Grant’s view is one I share, that offensive war does not become a free society.  But, I’m not an expert on Iraq and I don’t know what the threat was to the United States from Sadaam.  I suspect it wasn’t great but I leave that to the experts.  My point on Iraq was simply, I wonder if senior leaders of the intelligence community went to the president or went to Mr. Rumsfeld and said:  “Mr. President, if you attack Iraq you have America and it’s allies occupying the 2^nd holiest place in Islam.  We’re already, in many eyes, occupying the first holiest place in Islam, the Arabian Peninsula.  And the Israelis are occupying the 3rd most holy place in Islam in Jerusalem.  And it’s perhaps not wise to create a situation where you’re occupying all those places and angering to an even greater extent 1.3 billion Muslims.  Now that’s a very simple piece of analysis.  It requires no classified information, no secret intelligence, no imagery, nothing.  It’s a fact.  It’s not…there’s no genius in that.  But the intelligence community as a whole is so loathe to talk about religion or any of these hot button politically correct issues, that I really wonder if anyone went to the President and said that. 

INSKEEP:  I just want to try to sum up your point here, to make sure there’s not a contradiction.  It sounds like you're saying, using force has worked out terribly for the United States so far in Iraq and Afghanistan but it's time to use even more force.

MIKE: No. I think what I'm saying is that force is our only option, and we have used it so far in a very dainty manner.  Our leaders are, our generals are, just obviously, excruciatingly fearful of losing very many soldiers.  They expect to win wars with losing no one.  I think the actual combat soldier, the Marine soldier on the ground, the pilot realizes that there’s no way to win a war without losing on both sides.  But we have applied…for example, the al-Qaeda problem exists today, the bin Laden problem exists today, because we were unwilling to commit our own soldiers to do the dirty work, to go into the Tora Bora mountains...

INSKEEP: In Afghanistan.

MIKE: ...in Afghanistan and take care of the rest of bin Laden. In Iraq, we put on a brilliant military show of speed and the use of airpower, but 400,000 Iraqis went home with their guns. We didn't close the borders and now there's foreign fighters flowing in from everywhere, and it's not the fault of the soldier on the ground or the commander on the ground. It's, I think, the fault of the generals who should have said, `Historically speaking, wars cause casualties,' and if you don't fight a war to a conclusion, you end up fighting it again and again.

INSKEEP: If bin Laden was killed, would that make an immediate difference in the problem?

MIKE: It would have made a big difference three years ago. It will make a difference to al-Qaeda as an organization right now because al-Qaeda's absolutely unique because of the multiple nationalities involved in the group, the multiple ethnic groups, the multiple linguistic groups. Bin Laden, as far as we know, is an absolutely unique individual. He has the right credentials in terms of fighting. He is a pious, devout Muslim and he's respected for that.  He’s lived the life of…he's a billionaire who's lived the life of a peasant.  And apparently he’s a very sturdy man.  Anyone who’s drunk Sudanese and Afghan water for twenty years is clearly not a weak fella.  The problem for us, for the United States, is what's happened in the past three years is, A, he survived and he's basically showed the Muslim people around the world that he can defy the United States, take their best shot and still have our leaders telling the Congress that al-Qaeda is possibly going to explode a weapon of mass destruction in the United States.

INSKEEP:  You mentioned that, as a CIA officer you’ve been called before some of these investigations.  Since you last spoke to us one of the investigations has been published.  The Senate Intelligence Committee put out a 500 page report.  It found that your agency, the Central Intelligence Agency overstated the evidence of weapons of mass destruction, and fell victim to groupthink, that this is a deeply flawed agency.  Do you agree? 

MIKE:  I have a little different view of that.  I think the Senate group and the other report that’s coming out from the Kean Commission about 911 singularly failed to understand how the analytic process works.  One of the great triumphs of the intelligence community, especially the Central Intelligence Agency has been to hire brilliant people, especially over the last 6 or 8 years.  If Mr. Tennet had a legacy that will be one of them.   But they don’t understand—either the Congress or the Kean Commission—I think they don’t have a good handle on how analysis is treated once it’s been written.  The officer who has the expertise on the analysis submits his piece and then it goes through multiple layers of review and is shaped, those layers for grammatical correctness and format.  But also, along the way, if it’s a piece that intends to say perhaps American policy or decisions are a little copped up in one area, that will be deleted.   And it will be shaped along the line to deliver the message the upper level management wants to deliver rather than the message that the analysts want to deliver.

INSKEEP:  And that’s what the Senate Intelligence Committee found to some degree; they alleged there were findings about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that were just ignored. 

MIKE:  I think that’s exactly right.  Generally speaking and it’s only occurred to me in the last few days…the intelligence on Iraq was sexed up to make it look better than it was, both in our country and in Britain.  And I can say that from my own experience the intelligence on al Quaeda and bin Laden was consistently sexed down to limit, or to not portray the threat exactly.  So the danger in both of these instances is that both the analytic core and the operational core of the Central Intelligence Agency will come out looking like bumbling chumps who didn’t recognize the threat.  There’s nothing further from the truth.  The working level officer whether he’s an operations officer, an analyst or a logistition is a brilliant man.  The agency, as I’ve said has done great work in recruiting.  But the message that’s finally delivered to the policy maker, I believe, too often reflects the intelligence community senior management’s view on what they want to be heard.  I’ m very concerned that the results to both these investigations don’t allow the fall to be taken by men and women who risk their lives abroad, by those who work 12 to 15 hours a day 7 days a week to try to protect America.  Intelligence failures don’t come from those individuals.  Intelligence failures come from senior managers who won’t make the community work as it should and who will not present the unvarnished truth to the elected official.  The difference between the people who actually do the work, the analysts, the operators, the targeters, they have, through their experience learned to see the world as it is.  The senior managers traditionally, I think, see the world as they want it to be.  They think they’re going to let Mr. Chalabi build a democratic Iraq in 6 months.  I think Tom Paine called it:  “The phantom delusion of hope.” And that’s an affliction that’s very much occurring in this intelligence community at the senior levels.  I would also say, much is said, and it’s become boiler plate to talk about the problems of political correctness but we are in a situation where, if you do not understand the differences between cultures, if you don’t  accept that there are people who are fighting us because of religion or because of their own patriotism, and automatically qualify them as gangsters, it’s a mistake and it’s a fatal threat to the United States.  

INSKEEP: We've been talking to the author of "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror." He is a CIA analyst, and he's asked us to refer to him only as Mike.

Thanks very much for coming by.

MIKE: A pleasure, sir.