Full Transcript
Dhruva Jaishankar: Hello, I'm Dhruva Jaishankar, Executive Director of the Observer Research Foundation America. We are approaching the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks which witnessed the complete destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, severe damage to the Pentagon in Washington, and the use of four civilian airliners as weapons. Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives that day but the implications of 9/11 went far beyond, ushering in an era defined by the US-led global war on terror and resulting in US military involvement in Afghanistan and then subsequently Iraq. The repercussions were felt around the world from Europe to Southeast Asia, and from Russia to the Middle East and Africa. And although the immediate aftermath may seem increasingly like a distant memory, the legacy of 9/11 is still very much with us today. One outcome of that was the 9/11 report by a national commission on terrorist attacks upon the United States. This was an independent bipartisan commission which was mandated by Congress which completed its report three years later in 2004. Other than being an extraordinarily well researched and well written report, it had wide implications with recommendations on relations with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia on restructuring intelligence, aviation security, and on building coalitions and encountering proliferation and terrorist financing. With that, it's a great privilege to have Professor Philip Zelikow at the University of Virginia joining us today. Professor Zelikow was executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and played several key roles in the US government both before and after that tenure, including as counselor, the US State Department. Thank you, Professor Zelikow for joining us. I’d like to begin with a somewhat personal question. The 9/11 attacks affected a lot of us personally, many of us - myself included - can remember where exactly we were when we heard the news about the planes hitting the Twin Towers. How do you remember 9/11 itself?
Philip Zelikow: It was a beautiful Tuesday morning across the East Coast of the United States. I was at work, as usual, at the University of Virginia when I heard the news of the first attack. I was then directing a research center at the University, and went over to a room where we had a television on and in course, the tragic events became very clear. I had actually helped lead a study group and had written a prominent article in Foreign Affairs three years earlier called Catastrophic Terrorism: The New Danger. And in that article, I had said - as an example - that a successful terrorist attack on the World Trade Center would be another Pearl Harbor. A watershed in the history of the United States. That was published in the fall of 1998. So, on that day when these attacks occurred, I remembered that article and the work we had done on those issues. Sadly, I think that that warning was timely.
Jaishankar: You'd worked with and knew a lot of the people who were then in the US government. Were you contacted by them very soon after (the attacks), did you reach out to many of them in the immediate aftermath?
Zelikow: I was not a government employee at the time. Later that Fall I was asked to join the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board which advises the White House on how to work on intelligence issues - a board which I served on for President Bush and then later actually for President Obama as well. And then the National Security Adviser Condi Rice was a longtime friend of mine, someone whom I had worked with when we were both younger - in the administration of the elder President Bush. I was a Foreign Service Officer at the time - a career diplomat - a profession I think you know a lot about. We had written a book together about the unification of Germany and the end of the Cold War. So when this event happened, I was asked at different times to offer advice about different things as a private citizen about how the government should learn some of the lessons of 9/11. And so I was working on some of those issues in different capacities on into 2002. Then, at the beginning of 2003 I was asked to direct the 9/11 Commission.
Jaishankar: So, when you were brought into that process, what were some of your expectations before you joined the 9/11 commission?
Zelikow: I thought it was a very difficult job. It turned out that the impulse to recommend me came from the Democratic vice chair of the Commission, a man named Lee Hamilton, because I had also worked with people in the Clinton administration, worked with a number of Democrats, and during 2001 had led a bipartisan commission having to do with the reform of our election system, which had been a very controversial issue during the presidential election of 2000. So I knew that it would be very difficult to do a proper bipartisan investigation on the subject, and that it would be very important to get the cooperation and support of the President, but also of key Democrats as well. I thought we would have the full support of the President, and got assurances about it. But it turned out that parts of the White House however did not want to cooperate with the Commission, and that became a source of great stress and problems later on, which we overcame but I had not anticipated. I knew it would be difficult, but I had not anticipated. One of the interesting challenges right upfront was the need to get outside of the United States and reach out to people overseas. I make this particular point with you too, as someone who tries to bridge these worlds of understanding. A lot of Americans tended to see the 9/11 attacks as basically foreigners in their country, and see it through a very American lens. And there had actually been some initial reports that looked at this very much through a very narrow American point of view. I was very concerned right away that we needed to get to Saudi Arabia. We need to get to Yemen, to Pakistan, to Afghanistan. We needed to go those places, personally, and talk to people and have a real feel for the world from which this attack came and take that foreign dimension really very seriously. And so quite a good deal of the report is actually about al Qaeda, about the origins of al Qaeda, about the way the plot developed, and about the mileu of militant Islam in which these attacks became possible.
Jaishankar: Some of the difficulties you referred to, with the White House that you had not anticipated...did that have to do with the sharing of information or access to witnesses…?
Zelikow: Access to documents and access to witnesses. Access to certain intelligence documents which are problems which we usually overcame but became more of a struggle than I thought it would be.
Jaishankar: As you mentioned, the scope of the 911 Commission report is extraordinarily wide. What was it like conducting the research and compiling the report itself and how was it working with members of the commission, Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton, the chair and vice chair?
Zelikow: Let me comment on that in a couple of different ways. The first is you have these commissioners. The 10 commissioners are appointed in a very political process, five Republicans and five Democrats. Now, people have this very gauzy nostalgic memory of the harmony of coming together, but they were appointed in a very political process, and the Commission delivered its report in a presidential election year in which President Bush was up for reelection. I say that as a way of paying extra tribute to the chair and vice chair of the Commission, Tom Keane and Lee Hamilton. They set a model of bipartisan solidarity and cooperation that then had a nice rippling effect on the conduct of all the other Commissioners and they in turn were the source of all the guidance and direction for me, as the director of the full time staff. So the other side of this is we had more than 80 people working for us in three different offices, organizing the investigation with great care not only in Washington DC, but also in New York City. And so the effective organization of that staff and getting outstanding people to work for you and feel like this is a rewarding enterprise, and building turn on a huge amount of work that our FBI had done, and other agencies... I was very fortunate to have actually outstanding staff, and, and we did a lot of things to try to help that staff work as a team, and feel a sense of common identity with what we were trying to do. So, one dimension is working with the commissioners and managing that process. And I've called out the importance of our leadership in setting the example. The other part of that is to really spotlight the significance of the staff, because the staff is unglamorous and often overlooked, but actually the quality of the staff work makes or breaks the quality of this sort of effort. And in this case, we had a terrific staff and I think we were able to do very good work that has stood the test of time.
Jaishankar: Looking back, what elements of the 9/11 Commission report do you think have had the greatest legacy. How did it affect how policymakers and the general public approach the global war on terror, issues like Homeland Security and national security writ large?
Zelikow: People point to various bureaucratic things. We recommended some reorganizations in the intelligence community, which were later enacted in the way Congress wanted to do it. Probably one of our most significant innovations is not very well known. There's something called the National Counterterrorism Center, which has been very effective. But what I want to do is I want to get past the bureaucratic innovations. The most important impact of the Commission report was to take a tremendous mass trauma, and help people make sense of it. It was the creation of a strong foundational narrative for what happened and why. That then helped us to naturally spotlight certain issues and spotlight certain ways of thinking about the problem. In a way, instead of the problem being an infinite hydra of terrorism, you know it was a concrete thing. It had a presence, it was important then to think about not letting these terrorist organizations gain uncontested sanctuaries. If you read the report, you begin to realize the significance of there's no miracle defense. It's a defense in layers, and that emerges as you see from the way you read the story. My point is that when you have a report like this, that makes sense of a trauma that millions of people have experienced, a lot of the most important things that will come out of that is the common understanding of the story. That will then shape the way people approach the problem and in 100 ways that you might not be able to put your finger on bureaucratically but shaped the whole way society has responded. That's the most constructive and important thing that a commission effort like this can do after a country suffers a major tragedy. By the way, I think there's a need for a similar effort of this kind in the case of the current pandemic crisis, and I'm involved right now in directing a planning group to organize just that. So, and, incidentally, I think that this is a point of interest not only to the United States but to a number of countries, very much including India. So this gets things in proportion, proper proportion. People will get very right away certain powerful narratives in their head about blame. (We) help get those right size and put in a proper perspective.
Jaishankar: ...And also, I suppose, anticipating a future similar challenge in the future
Zelikow: The 21st century is a century in which these sorts of transnational emergencies are an increasingly common facet of civilized life. Think about it. In the 21st century we had these great terrorist calamities. India has been victimized too. Then comes the global financial crisis. Now this global pandemic. And you notice that these are not, these are not the mid 20th century style. These are issues of a different character that are very globalized. We face them very much in our own societies and our own communities. But we look around and find that all these other communities have these common problems, and that we can share and learn from each other and work together.
Jaishankar: A final question I have is..when you think about the political polarization today... we've talked about the January 6 Commission...is it going to become more difficult to do that sort of effort, as you've described?
Zelikow: I think it is more difficult. I think people now get their information from a wider variety of sources, and the danger of misinformation is great. There is a greater distrust of expertise and of authority so that the notion of consensus somehow seems diminished. I think, however, the answer to that is not to give up and not to surrender to the anarchy of truth. I think it's important, it's all the more important in fact to adapt to the new technologies, to the new mediums of communication, and to strongly reassert the significance of getting to the bottom of things, finding out what happened, of establishing strong factual records, and of doing a good job on history. You see, against all the forces of disintegration, the forces of integration need to reassert themselves even more strongly, and nothing is more important than to have a strong sense of history and understanding of the backstories that prefigure everything that happens to us in our lives.
Jaishankar: Okay, well thank you again for joining us. I have my copy of the 9/11 report here. I do think it's sort of...I studied as a historian, you're a professor of history and I do think it's valuable for all of us to take a step back sometimes to look back on these important events in the past and how they continue to affect our day to day existence today. Thank you again for joining us and I thank you for this very enriching conversation.
Zelikow: Well, thank you Dhruva.