“It's kind of childish to think that a fairly major nuclear-armed power is just going to do what we want them to do.”
The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition · October 2026
Bergen was talking about Americans who served in Afghanistan and blame Pakistan for sheltering the Taliban leadership. His view is that Pakistan was always going to act in its own security interest, and that it hedged because it expected the United States to leave. He adds that on that last point Pakistan turned out to be right.
Transcript
all right. Well, the great thing about writing works of history, as you've done, is like we keep learning things we didn't know. So we always knew that Jim Mattis, then a one-star general, had 1,500 Marines in Kandahar. But it wasn't really clear why they weren't at the Battle of Toro Bora, what happened. And then when Jim Mattis published his relatively recent autobiography, he said that he repeatedly requested for his Marines to be deployed from southern Afghanistan to Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. Now, you can't imagine a more gung-ho commander with a more gung-ho group of troops than 1,500 Marines under Brigadier General, then Brigadier General Jim Mattis. That request was never disallowed, and it was never, you know, no one responded. So he just died. And similarly, Gary Burnson, a very gung-ho CIA ground commander, requested a battalion of rangers. That was actually turned down by General Tommy Franks, who will go down as one of the least impressive generals of the modern era in American history. He managed to turn down a request to get bin Laden when he was surrounded for reasons that are, you know, he's elucidated publicly and to me in an email why he didn't do that. Some of his reasoning is just totally specious. I think we didn't want to replicate the Soviet invasion. Well, 800 Rangers in a small part of Afghanistan, again, bin Laden is not occupying and invading Afghanistan for a decade as the Soviets did and killing a million Afghans. I mean, it's just like, this is history by analogy that makes no sense. And then later, when it became a political issue in the 2004 election, he actually wrote a piece in the New York Times saying it wasn't clear with the intelligence if he was really there. This is untrue. And the reason I could say that with great authority is, if you go back and you look at the public statements of Vice President Cheney, Paul Wolfwood, during that time period, they said, yeah, we think he's in Tor. These are public statements. These are not classified statements. So, you know, that was one of the big what-ifs. And I think another big what-if is there was a narrative that grew up. We should have included the Taliban at the Bonn conference that began November 25th, 2001. That was kind of the original sin. Actually, that narrative is not correct. Laksha Al-Brahimi, who was the UN leader of that conference, said that. But I think he's a smart guy. The fact is, the Northern Alliance of the United States would never have let the Taliban to attend the Bonn conference when they were still fighting the war. Now, they surrendered to Karzai, the president. Elector of Afghanistan on December 5th, 2001. That was the time to make peace. I mean, they knew they were utterly defeated, and we could have made peace with them. You know, Kazai was willing to give them amnesty, make peace with them. Rumsfeld nixed it. We heard from the White House, from the spokesman at the time, he also nixed it within a day or two. So that was a road not taken and bracketing the Taliban and Al-Qaeda as the same group. Essentially, A, muddled our thinking during the initial stages of the war because the Taliban became the goal rather than necessarily al-Qaeda. And then it also became a self-fulfilling prophecy because the Taliban began to look a lot more like al-Qaeda as the years went on, using IEDs, using suicide attacks, and the like. So that was a big missed opportunity. So, I mean, unfortunately, there were quite a lot of them. And Obama made a version of this mistake. After the Afghan surge, he could have made peace with the Taliban, brought them to the negotiating table when they were really taking a real pounding in southern and eastern Afghanistan when McChrystal was the commander and the surge of troops had gone in. But, you know, Holbrook was appointed as a special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. That seemed to be a signal we were willing to do a deal with the Taliban. He died, unfortunately. And also, he began discussions with the Taliban at a pretty low level. So it wasn't the Obama administration missed the opportunity to make a deal with the Taliban with every passing year. By the time we got to the negotiating table with them in earnest under the Trump term one in 2018, they drove a very hard bargain, a bargain that was a terrible one, which was no Afghan elected government officials at the table, pretending to separate from al-Qaeda, et cetera, et cetera, and all the things you know that they didn't do.
Let me ask you a very different question about mistakes. Because when I look at my own analytic record, I certainly made my share of misjudgments. Are there mistakes that the people in senior positions in the policy world made that you're actually sympathetic to? They got it wrong, but yeah, that's understandable and frankly forgivable, as opposed to, I'll say, some of what you detail, Toribor being one example, where I think, you know, most Americans would have scratched their head even more in 2001. They're saying, right, you know, this guy who just murdered 3,000 Americans, you know, you're letting him go. But are there things you look back and you're like, okay, that was a mistake in hindsight, but I'm actually very sympathetic to it.
Well, I mean, some of the mistakes are so big, you can't be, I mean, the Iraq War of Choice helped undercut. I think the Iraq War of Choice and the financial crisis in 2008 really kind of, there's a reason that Americans are very suspicious of their elites because they seem to have absolutely no idea what they're doing. And the Iraq war permanently hobbled Hillary Clinton's chances of becoming president. It greatly enabled President Barack Obama to become president, and the war on terror was quite useful for Trump as a, you know, the Muslim ban was a somewhat popular idea and for terrorism was top of mind in the first Trump term election because ISIS was at its height. So I will say that as I was writing this, you know, counterinsurgency, you were called down at a certain point in DC became a sort of religion. And I will include myself as somebody who was sort of converted. At first start, I knew very little about counterinsurgency. But I remember attending a talk by Dave Kilcullen at IISSS in London, and he was talking about, I was like, well, I haven't really heard about these concepts before. I mean, and, you know, the whole in at West Point, you learn more about the American Civil War by orders of magnitude than about counterinsurgency, right? And if you look back at the American doctrinal manual, I mean, the military runs on doctrine, I think there were on 9-11, there were 300 pages about various kinds of things and two about counter-insurgency. So we went into these wars not knowing much about counter-insurgency. So once there was a doctrine developed, it seemed to be kind of a panacea because, you know, in Iraq, it seemed to work so well, but it worked in Iraq. When I hear the word counter-insurgency strategy, I don't like that term because counter-insurgency is a set of tactics. It's not really anything strategic. And most of it is common sense. Don't kill a lot of civilians, get off your large bases because you're not going to understand the country. Take advantage of the political situation. And one thing we did very adeptly in Iraq was not only just apply counterinsurgency tactics, send the 30,000 troops at the surge, which indicated to the Iraqi government and our allies that you could ally with us and it wouldn't be a problem because we were still staying the course, which at the time I thought was a doubling down on a bad bet. But I mean, the big deal was the awakening, as you know, Dan. And the awakening was 100,000 Iraqi tribals used to be firing at the United States. We then put them on our payroll and they started firing at al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Shia militias. And, you know, that was a huge surge. So we adeptly, it's a great question because as I, you know, what we couldn't, the counter-insurgency couldn't solve. The basic strategic questions we had in Iraq, which were the underlying Sunni Shia-Sunni civil war that we in part precipitated and that eventually produced ISIS. And now, one of the other great waters, what if we'd left troops in Iraq in December 2011? Liam Pinetta, who was Secretary of Defense, Borburges, who was also Secretary of Defense, Hillary Clinton, and Jim Maddis, who was Central Command Commander, all urged for a residual force in December 2011 in Iraq. Could the rise of ISIS have been stopped if we'd had, let's say, 3 or 4,000 U.S. troops in an advise and assist air support intel role that we left? Maybe. But the fact is, this was an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration. The Obama administration went through with the withdrawal, and it was very popular with the American public and the Iraqi public. So it was a what-if moment. But on the other hand, if you were in charge in Iraq or the United States, this is something Americans wanted out, and Iraqis want us to have. But one of the themes of the book, which I, you know, I'm curious to see what you think about this, Dan, is on the left of the Democratic Party and on the right of the Republican Party, the sort of unanimity that the absence of American troops equals peace. I have not to believe that. I mean, one of the lessons of the book is persistent level of relatively small numbers of American troops can really be a false multiplier. We saw that with the war against ISIS. We trained up the Iraqi counter-terrorism service, in particular, that Golden Division. They really, you know, they ended the rule of ISIS in Iraq with our support. Same with the Syrian Democratic, Kurdish, largely Kurdish forces. So that turned out to be politically sustainable, financially sustainable for the United States. It was relatively few American fatalities. The dying and the fighting was done by Syrians and Iraqis. The liberation was done by Syrian and Iraqis. That said, it came at a tremendous cost. There were 35,000 American airstrikes. The Mosul was turned almost into a parking lot. So, you know, one of the, obviously, you don't want the first lesson is don't go to war at all if you can avoid it. The second lesson is, what is the least bad approach we can take? And, you know, what I call go light, go long is probably the least bad approach. It itself is not a panacea. And, you know, can we, in a future conflict, could we go light and go long, but also like reduce the massive amount of American air power that's used to defeat whatever the enemy is that we're fighting? You know, that would be, I think, the next step. And probably with, you know, that was in between 2014 and 2018 with far more precise armed drones. Maybe you could lower the number of airstrikes that you carry out. But, you know, you asked the question about, you know, were the decisions that were, you know, I mean, certainly the surge of troops in Afghanistan was something I thought was a good idea. And I don't think it was a bad idea, but I don't think we took advantage of it politically. And we weren't going to solve some of the big strategic questions just by a surge of troops, which were the incompetence and corruption of the Afghan government. That was going to take a while. And the Pakistan safe haven for the Taliban leadership. And I want, you know, I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. You often hear Americans of various kinds who've served there who say, you know, blame Pakistan. I've always had the same reaction. It's like, we're never going to bribe, control, pay, traduce, you know, order the Pakistanis to do things that were ultimately not in their national security interests, just as they weren't going to, you know, we're going to act in our national security interests. It's kind of childish to think that a fairly major nuclear-armed power is just going to do what we want to do, them to do. It just, that's not the way. When it came to fighting al-Qaeda, they were more than happy. As you recall, General Purvez Musharraf was narrowly escaped being killed twice by al-Qaeda in 2003. So, you know, they were perfectly happy to help us with that. But when they saw that our attention was wandering to Iraq, I quote Ryan Crocker, the very effective U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, who talked to General Kayani, who was the chief of staff of the army, effectively the most important person in Pakistan. And they were having this discussion about the Taliban, and Kiani was very blunt with Crocker, just said, look, we know you left in the 1980s after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and that's a very lived history for us. Yeah, and we're hedging our bets. We think you're going to leave. Well, I mean, unfortunately, he was right.
I would strongly agree with your point about limited numbers of U.S. troops can do a lot. I think both recognizing that capacity, but also, as you said, understanding the limits is vital, right? You're not going to do regime change in Iraq in the sense of putting in a new government that's stable with a couple thousand troops, right? So you have to kind of lower the bar of what you're trying to accomplish. But since, frankly, over 100,000 troops didn't do that particularly well, I'm not sure that you're losing much by giving up the rather grandiose ambition.
Well, also, you know, I mean, some of this is so basic, it's amazing that we have to even say this, but like understanding the environment you're about to go into. I think it was Jeff Stein, who was an American journalist. I believe it was he, he'd often ask American politicians what's the difference between the Shia and the Sunni, almost none of them, including, I think, the guy who was like the head of the House Armed Services Committee had no idea. You know, it's a simple question. If you can't answer it, like you shouldn't be in the business of invading the country and turning the power, basically turning the pyramid with the Sunnis, minority Sunnis on top and the majority Shia on the bottom and flipping the pyramid by overthrowing Saddam, you effectively started an insurgency, what became a civil war. And democratization simply amplified it because the Sunnis boycotted the elections and the Shia suddenly were in charge. And then they behaved in a sort of authoritarian way, which ultimately led to the rise of ISIS. Anyway, we had no idea. We, the United States, had no idea about Iraq. And we didn't have, I mean, clearly, the people around Trump have very little idea about what was possible in Iran. And so here we are. It's actually a depressing place because you, as a political scientist and also an expert on terrorism, myself as a quasi historian and journalist on terrorism, it seems like we don't even learn from our very recent history, let alone, you know, just
that is depressing. I want to drag you back to a conversation we had almost 25 years ago that you may not even remember, and perhaps I'm misremembering. But I will say for readers who don't know, Peter was, to my knowledge, the first outside person, non-government person, to warn about Al-Qaeda, not just as, hey, this is a dangerous organization, but that this is a tremendous threat. And, you know, we can go around the world. There were individuals, but you were one of the few voices saying that.
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