We also knew that our intelligence systems had failed,
and that the president would have been briefed that we still,
despite having been tracking Bin Laden for up to five years,
there's still very little we knew about this organization.
How big was it? What is its structure?
Other than its headquarters and home base in Afghanistan,
where else were they located?
How did they receive their financing and how did they communicate with each other?
How highly trained were they?
What were their intentions?
What were their capabilities with respect to what I just mentioned,
weapons of mass destruction?
What kind of communications and connections do they have with other countries or are
they underground networks which could have provided them these kinds of weapons?
As our decision makers awoke on September 12,
they would have had many,
many more questions than the intelligence community
would have been able to provide them with answers.
And indeed, the most troubling aspect
probably would have been the information that we had
virtually no human intelligence resources in these organizations.
We had spent decades fighting the Cold War.
Our major concern had been the Soviet Union.
Our people were trained to study, analyze,
and infiltrate that enemy.
But our abilities, both our language capabilities,
our connections, our ability to infiltrate a very small,
tightly organized terrorist organization located abroad and very difficult to access,
was a new and important challenge for the Central Intelligence Agency and, indeed,
the entire intelligence community,
that would have to be literally built from scratch starting on September 12.
Not only did Al-Qaeda present a huge intelligence challenge,
but we would soon learn that
the interconnectivity between the aspects of our intelligence community,
most especially between the domestic and the international aspects were deeply broken;
that there were inter-agency rivalries;
that there were cultural differences between these agencies;
that there was a culture of secrecy and not sharing,
and a culture and patterns and policies that were
literally undercutting our ability to effectively stop terrorism.
In some sense, this could be seen well after 9/11.
This was a bureaucratic problem,
that the fingers could be snapped and
a government leader could say this won't happen anymore.
But bureaucracies and cultures take,
literally, years to modify,
change and alter, and this was
a bigger challenge than we knew was facing us on September 12.
Of course, there was still a great deal we didn't know about Bin Laden himself.
Why exactly was he so motivated to execute these attacks?
How powerful was he?
How great was his following?
What were his true future intentions?
Al-Qaeda's fingerprints were clearly all over the 9/11 attack.
The attack on the USS Cole.
The Kenya and Tanzania bombings.
Three successful attacks on United States interests in just over three years.
What was Bin Laden's next move?
Who were his allies in this endeavor?
And, indeed, what kind of power did he have?
Much uncertainty about the nature,
not only of his terrorist network,
but of the individual himself.
And where was he located?
We knew he was in Afghanistan.
But a more difficult terrain,
a place to operate for the United States,
a place where it had virtually no diplomatic connections or influence,
a more difficult place on the globe probably could not be found.
I'm certain that the American President knew that
action would need to be taken ultimately with our military, our intelligence,
in Afghanistan, but also must have wondered: how are we
going to operate in what must be the most difficult terrain?
The British, of course,
had come to Afghanistan in the 19th century and then the Soviets in the 20th.
It was not called the "graveyard of empires" for nothing.
Would America be able to execute its counterterrorism goals in this bewildering,
difficult, very foreign, landlocked,
and extremely poor country?
Or would it, too,
fall in the history that we've seen of this being
a virtually difficult place for which a superpower to impose its will on?
And then, finally, of course,
there is the enigma of the Middle East,
which had been plaguing U.S. policymakers literally for 40 years,
with our interventions getting greater but also
the unpopularity of our policies increasing.
The threats from Iran,
starting from the revolution from 1979 to the present day.
Saddam Hussein, which we had gone to war against just 10 years earlier,
still situated in Iraq and with
knowledge that he previously had built nuclear weapons programs.
The Israel-Palestine conflict still going full bore.
This region sitting on top of massive deposits of
petroleum and other energy products which our economy desperately needed to function.
Dictatorships laced throughout this region,
some of which were pro-American like in Egypt and Saudi Arabia,
but others which were virulently anti-American,
in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and elsewhere.
An area that had huge levels of underdevelopment and poverty,
educational and human capital deficits.
So the problems of the Middle East were sitting
here and clearly had a deep connection to 9/11.
It was from this region that all of the 19 hijackers were from.
And it was the politics and the dysfunction of
this region that ultimately produced the ideology that led to the attacks.
So, on our mind must have been: What can we possibly do with the Middle East?
How do our policies need to be altered?
What can be done to try to stop the sources of
grievance that ultimately led to the creation of Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks?
So, as you can see,
the policies, the challenges,
that were facing the American President,
which we will ultimately turn to in the next half of this course,
were truly immense, daunting, and,
in some ways, unprecedented in the course of American history.
David SchanzerAssociate Professor of the Practice
