History of the War on Terror

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Well, this week does mark the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks on the United States. We'll be doing segments every day, today through Friday, acknowledging the solemn occasion for the families most directly affected, and also the very complicated history of the response to it, as well as the lead up to it over the last quarter century and more. Maybe you've heard the headlines in just the last few days, like around former New York Governor George Pataki, who spent a lot of time at the World Trade Center site in the aftermath of the attack. He was governor at the time, announcing that he believes he has a related respiratory condition now, and the Mamdani Administration announcing the release of more air quality records from those months after the buildings collapsed and burned. They are going to be adding to the ceremony at Ground Zero on Friday, something that I believe they haven't done in the past. We'll be covering that Friday morning, which is a moment of silence, not just for the individuals who were killed in the attack, but one for all the many, many people who worked on the pile, as they called it, first responders and many, many, many others, and who have gotten 9-11 related illnesses, and many have died since. So George Pataki, just perhaps the latest example of that, and a headline example which draws more attention to it, and still apparently some records about the air quality. What did Christine Todd Whitman, who was the EPA Administrator at the time, really know when she said it was safe to go back downtown so quickly after the attacks? Apparently, there are records that the city of New York is now going to release.

But in any case, immediately following the attacks, the country seemed more united than it ever had around the common goal of preventing another attack and catching the people responsible. But that common goal, as you no doubt know, quickly became something much broader and more porous. The post-9-11 response came to define American foreign policy ever since through wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, most centrally, the rise of ISIS in the 20-teens, and we can see its reverberation still with the war in Iran. I think it's accurate enough to say.

And many more people died, not just Americans who weren't hit by the attacks, as I was just referring to, but also how many Iraqis, hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million Afghans, others in the conflicts that followed 9-11, then in the attacks themselves on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on the airplane that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Well, Peter Bergen is a journalist and CNN national security analyst who's been covering the war on terror for decades. His new book is called All the Presidents' Wars, Twenty-Five Years of America's War on Terror, and it traces the major decisions made by the four presidents we've had since 9-11 and how they've shaped our country and the world. He's also uniquely qualified to tell the story. As I mentioned before the news, in 1997 he was part of a CNN team that interviewed Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan before al-Qaeda was a household name in this country, four years before 9-11. His book comes out today and again it's called All the Presidents' Wars, Twenty-Five Years of America's War on Terror. I should also mention the book went to print only a few weeks after Trump launched the ongoing war in Iran, so that's not the focus of the book per se, but he does provide some pretty critical context for understanding it. Peter, thanks so much for coming back on our show. It's been a while. Welcome back to WNYC.

Peter Bergen (4:09)

Thank you for having me back, Brian.

Brian Lehrer (4:12)

Before we get into some of the bigger themes of your new book, can you tell everyone who may not know your work, a little bit about your background as a journalist covering the war on terror and what came before. How did you come to interview Osama Bin Laden in 1997?

Peter Bergen (4:28)

Well, your studio is not very far from the Trade Center where I'm sitting, and on February 26th, 1993, a group of men drove a bomb-laden van into the basement of the Trade Center and blew it up, hoping to bring down both towers. You probably recall this, Brian. Six people died. Luckily, they didn't bring down the towers. But these guys had something in common. Some of them had trained in Afghanistan. Some of them had supported the Afghan war effort against the communists.

I went to my bosses at CNN and asked and said, hey, should we try and investigate this phenomenon? So the first time I went to Afghanistan was in 1993 during the civil war. I went with Peter Arnett, who was at the time the world's most famous foreign correspondent, arguably. And we spent a few weeks in Afghanistan, the time it was being wracked by a very violent civil war. But the bottom line was we concluded that Afghanistan would be the source of future terrorism going forward, anti-Western terrorism, because there were a group of militants who were training there, and they attacked the Trade Center already in 93 In 96, I heard Bin Laden's name for the first time. The State Department released a very useful kind of two-pager about him, describing him as a financier of Islamic extremism. I went back to my bosses at CNN and said, maybe this guy, Osama Bin Laden, is responsible for the Trade Center attack in 93, since it was well organized and organizations have leaders.