Washington Wednesday - The never-ending war

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 8th of September, 2021.

Thank you for joining us for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Washington Wednesday. Today, the War on Terror, 20 years later.

On September 20th, 2001, nine days after the deadly 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush addressed a Joint Congress and declared war on terrorist groups the world over.

BUSH: Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.

REICHARD: That can only mean even 20 years afterward, that war continues.

Well, joining us once again to provide more insight is James Carafano. He’s an expert on national security and foreign policy with the Heritage Foundation. Now a retired Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army, he formerly served on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Colonel, good morning!

JAMES CARAFANO, GUEST: Good to be with you.

REICHARD: Many analysts say terrorism has metastasized and is more global than it ever was. So I want to begin by asking you about that. Has the terror threat changed since September 11th, 2001?

CARAFANO: Well, actually, if you would have called me 30 days ago, I would have given you a completely different answer. So if you think about the President's quote where he says, terrorists with global reach, and and i think that's right, that is what really concerns us. I mean, look, we're not going to get rid of evil in the world. But what we don't want is, is somebody to have the capacity to do a global campaign, and to have people across the globe, always worried about whether they're going to be safe in their beds at night. And and you say, Well, we've been at this for 20 years, how could you argue in the last 30 days, we're less safe than we were 20 years ago. And the reason for that is this look, it's just, it's not that hard to get into the global terrorism business, you don't need a 501(k), you don't need a big HR department. It most. It's mostly about people, and a limited amount of resources. And so the focus of taking on global terrorism isn't really on toppling regimes and defeating armies. It's really not focusing on on the core network of people that would want to perpetrate something like 9/11. And what happened in the last 30 days, as everybody knows, is we walked away from Afghanistan. And when we did that, the Taliban came back in. And the Taliban have a couple of key relationships. One is with a group called the Haqqani Network, which is a terrorist criminal organization that spans Afghanistan, Pakistan. And the other of course is al-Qaeda. The leadership has been hiding out in Iran, they're going to go back to Afghanistan, they're basically going to put the band back together, and that they will be every bit as dangerous as before. And the Taliban now are actually more dangerous hosts, because they have more money, they have more territory, they have more international recognition. And they have a much bigger and more powerful army thanks to us than they did on 9/11. The reality is, is the ability to plan the next 9/11 is probably stronger in Afghanistan now than it was on the first 9/11. And not to fearmonger because that's not what I'm doing here. But if you look at this from Al Qaeda, and the Haqqani networks perspective, they have to do it over 9/11. And they have to plant it in Afghanistan. And they have to let everybody knows it came out of Afghanistan, because they have to demonstrate to the world that they are powerful, that they are blessed by God, that they have redeemed their honor for the humiliation of being defeated and driven out by the United States. So the day that we walked out, Al Qaeda walked in, and they are already thinking about the next day on the calendar that we never forget.

REICHARD: James, what tools do we have to identify and head off terror threats from Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world for that matter?

CARAFANO: Well, that is really the way to do this. So the way to do this is to focus first on people, not threats, you know, people would always ask me, What do you worry about, like a dirty bomb or a car bomb? Or? And my answer was, look, 99% of a terrorist attack looks the same. Don't focus on the 1%. Like, where the guy's got a machete or machine gun, focus on the people and stopping the people. And, and you certainly defense help, so he can screen people at airports and secure the border and all that. But the most effective way to stop a terrorist attack is to go out and find the terrorists and get them before they attack. And so that's really going on the offensive, and that is good intelligence, good counterterrorism operations, good cooperation. And we can do that. And let's be honest, we did it pretty effectively for 20 years. I mean, if you actually look, I mean, we used to have a database, on Islamist terror attacks aimed at the United States plots, right, because most of them were not, actually, like 99% of them were not successful. But we stopped counting. And the reason why we stopped counting is because they stopped happening. Most of that was going out and deconstructing most of the people that would really come after you. And then you know, we just abruptly stopped, it's like, somebody that is sick. And they're taking course of antibiotics. And then they've got like three pills left. And they just don't they just stop taking them. And of course, the disease just roars back stronger than ever, or like somebody's fighting a forest fire and the fire goes out, so they just walk away. And then the embers just flare up and burn again. I mean, Afghanistan, what we were doing in Afghanistan, we weren't nation building. We were doing a lot of things, what we're doing is we were watching to make sure the sparks never ignited again. And so we had 2500 soldiers who had taken casualties in the year and a half, they were actually costing us very, very little cost us less to stay in Afghanistan in a year than it used to cost in a week. In America, the cost of staying in Afghanistan was a rounding error compared to the cost of what it costs us to actually leave. So we were taking no casualties. We were stopping the country from being a terrorist sanctuary. And we were doing it at a very tiny cost. This is actually a great benefit to Americans. Now we spent an enormous amount of money to leave. We were humiliated. And literally we are like the blinded Cyclops we have blinded ourselves and a bunch of things are going to happen in that part of the world that we're going to have no knowledge of until they show up in an American street.

REICHARD: ISIS was a group most people had never heard of until after the United States pulled out of Iraq. Many analysts say that President Obama pulled American troops out of the country too quickly and that gave rise to ISIS. How do you see that?

CARAFANO: I think that's, that's accurate. Look, this is actually when people ask me, because I think a lot of people are upset about Afghanistan. And they say, Well, how could this go so wrong? My answer usually is how did you think this was not going to happen? Because essentially, we have the same foreign policy team here that we had in the Obama administration. And they're doing the same things. They walked away from Iraq, we got ISIS, we put walked away from the Syrian deadline, we got a genocide, we walked away from Libya, we got Benghazi. I mean, they do this again and again and again. And you know, it's like pulling the safety net away. And then just seeing somebody falls, and then trying to go back and deal with the aftermath of this. It's, they're actually very risk averse. They're actually want to disengage from the world stage, they actually don't cooperate with allies. They just want to outsource everything to other people, and focus on securing the domestic political power here at home and you turn your back on your enemies, and not surprisingly, they stab you in the back.

REICHARD: Final question for you: U.S. officials often note that Iran is the leading state sponsor of terror. What role does Iran play in fueling global terrorism and what could we do specifically about that?

CARAFANO: Well Iran funds kind of two kinds of terrorist activity, and they're actually a couple of states in the world, and that the Taliban will now be one of them, that use terrorism as a tool of statecraft. The Pakistanis do this. The Iranians do this more than ever, and it's it, they're really kind of two kinds. One is surrogates. So they fund the insurgency in Yemen, they fund Hezbollah, Hamas, they fund militias in Iraq, they fund terrorists in Syria, so they fund other people to attack their enemies. And the other is, is they go out and they kill people that against the regime. So recently, for example, they tried to kidnap an American journalist in America. A number of years ago, they they actually tried to hire people to put a car bomb in front of a restaurant and kill the Saudi ambassador. So, the Iranians are very aggressive. Now, what they what they don't do, is they don't do with groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS do, which is they have this vision of a caliphate, that that controls all the Islamic world. And it is established by a terrorist campaign that topples governments. That is a uniquely al-Qaeda kind of ISIS vision. And I think people sometimes get confused. We have ISIS, ISIS-K, and all these other things. Some and even Iran, because most al-Qaeda are Sunni, or most Iranians are Shia. And this is like, Well, why would she cooperate with Sunni him? Why would you know, one terrorist group cooperate or another? And the answer is, you know, they cooperate with each other, they they're just like governments, they have their self interest. And so sometimes they collaborate. Sometimes they ally, sometimes they they fight with each other. But the one thing that they all have in common whether you're ISIS-K or Haqqani network or the in paramilitary. They all want to see harm come to America. And they will all willingly step aside or collaborate, to make sure in the end, Americans are hurt, killed and humiliated.

REICHARD: Retired Lt. Colonel James Carafano with the Heritage Foundation has been our guest. Colonel, thanks so much!

CARAFANO: Hey, thanks for having me.

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