Two points are worth bearing in mind. First, bin Laden's strategic ideas for beating a superpower which U. Second, one critical lesson of is that we should not allow bin Laden's death to cause us to lose sight of the continued threat that al Qaeda poses.
Bin Laden's paradigms for fighting against a superpower foe were forged during the Afghan-Soviet war. Multiple factors prompted the December Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, including an Islamist insurgency that threatened the country's pro-Soviet regime and infighting among Afghanistan's communists that culminated in bloody internecine clashes.
Although the Soviet general staff opposed the invasion, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev insisted that operations in Afghanistan would end successfully in three to four weeks. But the war didn't turn out as he predicted: The Soviets would withdraw after nine years of costly occupation, experiencing stiff resistance from Afghan mujahidin backed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Bin Laden traveled to Pakistan in the early s, soon after the war began.
Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and former CIA officer, notes in his book The Search for al Qaeda that once he arrived, bin Laden became "a major financier of the mujahidin, providing cash to the relatives of wounded or martyred fighters, building hospitals, and helping the millions of Afghan refugees fleeing to the border region of Pakistan.
When bin Laden and his fellow Arab comrades-in-arms unexpectedly held their ground in the face of several attacks by Russian special forces spetsnaz near Khost, Afghanistan, in the spring of , the skirmish launched bin Laden to prominence in the Arab media as a war hero. Indeed, bin Laden has spoken of how he used "guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt.
For example, in October bin Laden said that just as the Arab fighters and Afghan mujahidin had destroyed Russia economically, al Qaeda was now doing the same to the United States, "continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. He gloated, "The mistakes of Brezhnev are being repeated by Bush. The Soviet invasion outraged the Muslim world, including heads of state, clerics, the Arab media, and the man on the street.
Hafez has written, "They included humanitarian aid workers, cooks, drivers, accountants, teachers, doctors, engineers and religious preachers. They built camps, dug and treated water wells, and attended to the sick and wounded.
His hideout had been built by a contracting firm often used by the ISI. Rashid argues that there is a complex syndicate of jihadi terrorists operating today in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda gets the most attention in the United States, but it is a relatively small organization in a much larger network. Lashkar-i-Taiba, the militant Islamist terror group that attacked Mumbai in , for example, has a much bigger and very overt presence in Pakistan.
He and bin Laden had been close partners in terror stretching back to the s, when the Saudi helped fund the creation of Lashkar-i-Taiba. The two men were in communication until the SEALs killed bin Laden in his hideout in Abbottabad, according to the materials found there.
So while al-Qaeda may be on the defensive thanks to U. As he notes, the obsession of Pakistani generals with India has been the driving force behind this creation, which is increasingly out of control. The fiasco in Kabul should be a wake-up call to get involved. Related Content Afghanistan Will Afghanistan become a terrorist safe haven again? Daniel L. Order from Chaos. A how-to guide for managing the end of the post-Cold War era. Read all the Order from Chaos content ».
Related Books. Afghanistan Will Afghanistan become a terrorist safe haven again? Pakistan How the mounting tension in Afghanistan is playing out for neighboring Pakistan Madiha Afzal. Order from Chaos A how-to guide for managing the end of the post-Cold War era. Foreign Policy. And if people can't hear the questions, I'll repeat them. Q: We didn't bring up Tibet again. What happens to Tibet at the end of this crisis? One deals with the question of military aid to India. Another deals with the question of Pakistan.
A third deals with the covert operation. And the Indians start supporting the Tibetan resistance. But with a lot of care. They don't want to provoke another Chinese invasion.
And they don't do very much to support the Tibetans inside. And by the mids, the Tibetan rebellion has fallen apart, collapsed. And the whole operation, basically the US and India say, "Too hard. What we'll do is cooperate on other things. And the Tibetan operation is all but dead, and finally finished off by Richard Nixon, who of course, despite being the most hardliner, anti-communist in American history, famously goes to China. And as part of that very significant change in American foreign policy, he shuts down all of these CIA operations trying to cause trouble with the communist Chinese.
The Chinese claim, of course, it's always been theirs. You could, and many people have, written very long books arguing about who has sovereignty there. I think it's safe to say that the Tibetan people are subjugated, secondclass citizens in their own country.
And what the Chinese are doing, which the Dalai Lama expected back in the s, is encouraging the mass migration of Han Chinese into Tibet, and also into Xinjiang, so that today the Tibetan population, the ethnic Tibetan population is a minority in their own country.
Would you say that's a consensus view, or is that new with your book? And also, the declassified documents that you refer to, when were they declassified?
TOM PUTNAM: Because we're recording this and people can't hear on the microphone, the first question had to do with the covert operation and whether that's the consensus view. And the second is a question about how these documents get declassified. Covert operations are, by definition, covert. They're supposed to be clandestine, secret affairs. But like most covert operations, this one in time became the subject of several books, including, of course, by the CIA officers who were engaged in the operations.
It's not a phenomenon; exspies writing about what they did goes back, I think, probably to Biblical times. Scholars who I think have studied this most closely come to the conclusion that Chinese motives were multiple, and that this was one of the factors in them. Because we don't have access to any Chinese archives, we can't say this was number one, and the Dalai Lama being in India was number two.
And he believed that this was all a product of American collusion with the Indians. And of course, there's the great irony, that the war actually produces the outcome that Mao Zedong was allegedly worried about upfront, the collusion that I mentioned, that comes afterwards. The critical documents, the most critical documents, the two letters Nehru sent on the 19 th of November, were only declassified, I think, three or four years ago.
Historians had known that these letters existed. The State Department, in its annual release of documents 15 years after they'd been written, noted that there were two letters, but didn't actually include the letters in the documents. On the Indian side, of course, as you alluded to, this is very humiliating.
And the existence of these letters was denied. Nehru's immediate successor, when asked about this, said, "We thoroughly checked the Indian archives. We've looked everywhere, and there are no copies of these letters.
So these letters don't exist. Galbraith, who wrote an absolutely magnificent diary of his time in New Delhi, which is just riveting to read, because it's very politically incorrect in many places, he alludes in his diary to the two letters, in some detail. But it wasn't until the Library here declassified them that the full extent of them was made available. And you can really see, particularly in the second letter, Nehru is a man at the end of his rope. He thinks his country is going under, and if he doesn't get American support and get it immediately, and that means American airplanes, American crews being willing to fight Chinese communists in the air, his country's going under.
Really kind of a dastardly history. I joked early on about the Shah of Iran, but we put the Shah of Iran in, overthrew a legitimate government in Guatemala. What's your response to those critics? These operations are all approved, and in many cases instigated by presidents. I said earlier, John F. Kennedy loved the thing. He's not alone. Presidents get into office— I use the Shah of Iran as a good example.
Eisenhower comes into office, and he has a very messy problem in Iran. The Iranian nationalist government, led by Mohammad Mossadegh, is trying to regain control of Iran's natural resources and actually get money out of the sale of oil from Iran. This was seen in the Cold War paradigm as flirting with the Soviet Union, flirting with fighting the global oil companies.
Eisenhower turned to the CIA and said, "What can you do about it? Eisenhower, after the fact, when Allen Dulles had pulled it off, was astounded. He said, "This is amazing. You restored the Shah of Iran without a single American being killed, not even one being wounded.
And at the cost of half-a-million dollars. There's a natural propensity, then, for presidents to say, "Hey, give me the quick, fast, cost-free CIA operation that gets me out of Dodge tonight," versus the really hard, let's change our policy, or let's invade, or something like that.
That's not to say that the CIA isn't capable of coming up with looney-tune operations. When you create an environment in which the White House is saying, "Solve the world's problems for us with some clandestine operation," you're going to come up with people who say, "Well, let's put poison in Castro's beard," or, "Let's see if we can arm the Tibetan rebels to defeat the communist Chinese.
That's where presidents become very important. And presidential leadership, not only in terms of saying yes or no to an operation, but also in picking the right guy to be the director of Central Intelligence.
I think Kennedy's big mistake, I alluded to at the beginning, was letting Allen Dulles stay on. Allen Dulles and his director of operations, Richard Bissell, had spent eight years being cowboys in the Eisenhower administration, and they thought they could continue being cowboys.
He needed someone who was a little bit more restrained. Ironically, he picked another Republican, John McCone, who was very hardliner Cold War era, but much, much more skeptical about covert operations. And he replaced Bissell with Richard Helms, a career CIA officer, who believed that covert operations by definition were stupid. Because they never stayed covert. They always became public.
And as Richard Helms told me at one point in his life, he said, "They always become public at exactly the most awkward moment for you. The action in Guatemala. Using your reasoning, just because we can do it, and we did that one very effectively, one could argue that Guatemala still suffers from not having a democracy because we overthrew a legitimate government because we were able to do something.
I was in the service during the onset of the Korean War, and we were briefed at the beginning about how the Dulles boys, the indirect or direct action that they took unilaterally to sort of provoke the Korean War, something about the boundary in North and South Korea.
Could you shed any light on that? The argument is usually about the Truman administration, which was still in office in He left out South Korea. And probably deliberately, because to be fair, at that point, the United States hadn't made a decision it was going to come to South Korea's defense. But I think a lot of historians, and I would agree with this, believe that that error sent a signal to Stalin, Mao and the North Korean dictator, that invading South Korea would be cheap and easy.
And they did. And then the United States—. He was kind of a rising star. Q: I had a few questions about the timeline of the November 19 th letter from India for help and the arrival of the naval task force in the Bay of Bengal and the Air Force operations, test operations training, versus the time that Mao decided to stop his invasion.
Who coordinated that? And did the invasion stop before the arrival of the task force and the Air Force? That's under way as the Chinese are advancing, and intensifies as time goes on. On 19 November, Nehru writes this letter asking for American combat aircraft to come. Kennedy immediately dispatches an aircraft carrier battle group.
Because the Chinese stopped 48 hours later, the aircraft battle group never arrives in the Bay of Bengal. The Navy says, "The crisis is over, let's withdraw. There's some confusion in other books about this.
Some books say the carrier battle group did arrive. Navy records are pretty clear — the carrier was dispatched by Kennedy on the evening of the 19 th , but because it's a long sail from South China Sea, where the carrier was deployed, to the Bay of Bengal, it never got there and never showed up.
The exercise I talk about takes place in the summer of So more than six months after the Chinese have stopped. And it's an air exercise; it's what the US military and other militaries do routinely in a lot of places around the world. But what was unusual about this is we'd never exercised in India before. And we'd never exercised in India in this manner, which was basically what Nehru had been asking for in that letter on the 19 th of November. So six, eight months after the letter, we actually carry out an exercise, which is in response to the spirit of that letter, but in a different atmosphere, when the war is not going on.
And the other thing that's I think quite interesting is, we don't do it alone. Most of the aircraft, most of the crews in that exercise in are American. But there's a substantial number of Brits, Canadians and Australians. So what Kennedy had done was ensure that if there was another war, and the United States came to track to India's defense, we weren't going to be there alone; we were going to be there with our allies. And you've talked primarily about the first, President Kennedy.
But the other is Ambassador Galbraith. And again, just your thoughts. He was an academic from Harvard. A brilliant writer. And yet, in his moment, he served the role as diplomat and peacekeeper in an amazing manner. Your final comment about John Kenneth Galbraith. With very little oversight from Washington, which he undoubtedly welcomed, but very little oversight from Washington, he not only served as ambassador to Nehru, he became Nehru's advisor during this conflict.
And became the man who Nehru looked on for strength. Of course, he had Kennedy behind him, so it was real strength. But he did more than just serve as a conduit for messages. His memoirs, as I say, are a delightful book. And despite the fact that he didn't like to be called arrogant, he was arrogant. And he also knew it. A lot of self-deprecating humor in the book, including him basically saying, "There's nothing so much fun as a crisis like this when you're on your own.
It's kind of like engaging in a night of drinking and fooling around with women with no responsibilities the next morning. These are not the kinds of things that politicians in would put in one of their books. But that's why I highly recommend—. He did other things. He published a series of short stories while he was ambassador, using a pseudonym, which ridiculed the State— I don't mean ridiculed, devastated the State Department and its kind of mindless bureaucracy. And he got away with it. Because he was the president's friend and, after two years, he was going back to Harvard.
And that's what he ended up doing. So if you want to go into the bookstore and then bring your books back here, Mr.
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