The big hole in Biden’s Afghan speech, CNN.com

Updated 6:11 AM ET, Tue August 17, 2021

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)President Joe Biden claimed in his speech to the nation on Monday that he was bound by the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan. However, there are multiple flaws with this argument.

First, the Taliban never observed the terms of that agreement, including that they would break ties with al-Qaeda. According to a UN report released earlier this year, they didn’t.

Second, the agreement said that the Taliban would enter genuine peace negotiations with the Afghan government. That didn’t happen either.
Third, the US-Taliban agreement was negotiated without any input from the Afghan government — which, after all, was the elected government of the country. Conveniently for the Taliban, they don’t believe in elections.

So, the Biden administration felt bound to an agreement made by the previous administration with an insurgent group that had excluded the actual government of Afghanistan.
But not long prior, the Trump administration jettisoned the 2015 Iranian nuclear agreement, which was negotiated by the Obama administration with a sovereign state and with some of the United States’ closest allies, the British, French, and Germans. That agreement was actually being adhered to by the Iranians, according to the American intelligence community.

That didn’t stop Trump from abandoning the Iranian nuclear agreement in 2018, which he often described as a terrible deal, even though it was actually working.
Now, the Biden administration is saying it had to adhere to Trump’s genuinely terrible deal with the Taliban, even though it wasn’t working at all.

What the administration has done in Afghanistan doesn’t make much sense. Biden could have easily said the Taliban had reneged on their agreement with the United States so he could continue to keep a relatively small US military force in Afghanistan to advise and assist the Afghan Army and to support the Afghan Air Force to thwart Taliban advances.

But Biden also believes in the merits of leaving Afghanistan regardless of Trump’s agreement with the Taliban. He argues that the US can’t be mired in endless wars, even though the American presence in Afghanistan had shrunk to only 2,500 troops — particularly few for a force of 1.3 million active-duty US service personnel. That small force helped to sustain the Afghan military physically and psychologically, not least with close air support

Now, the Biden administration unilaterally has pulled the plug on the US troop presence in Afghanistan, which cratered morale among the Afghan military and population. It also precipitated thousands of Western-allied soldiers to head for the exits, as well as the many thousands of contractors in Afghanistan that were, among other things, keeping the Afghan Air Force aloft.

And now the white flags of the Taliban flutter all over Afghanistan. It did not need to be this way.

Afghanistan’s first female ambassador to the US: ‘It was avoidable’, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 11:14 AM ET, Mon August 16, 2021

Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)Roya Rahmani is the first woman to serve as Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States, a position she held from 2018 until last month. Bergen spoke to her over the weekend about the fall of much of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Rahmani who is in the United States, says she worries that with the Taliban taking over, the civil wars that have wracked Afghanistan will continue. She is also concerned that the rights of Afghan women will disappear under their rule.

Rahmani was born in Kabul in 1978, a year before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, thrusting the country into a cycle of wars that has continued for more than four decades. Her family fled to neighboring Pakistan where she grew up as a refugee. Rahmani obtained a bachelor’s degree in software engineering at McGill University in Canada, and later a master’s in public administration from Columbia University. Before taking up her post as Afghan ambassador in Washington, DC, Rahmani was Afghanistan’s ambassador to Indonesia.
Bergen’s discussion with Rahmani was edited for clarity and length.

BERGEN: How do you feel right now?

RAHMANI: Distressed, worried. I am extremely concerned about what is to come, and I’m extremely worried for my family and my people back at home.

BERGEN: Do you think this was all avoidable, the situation we’re in today?

RAHMANI: Oh, yes. I mean, absolutely! Absolutely, it was avoidable. I don’t think at this point it matters who we should point our fingers to and who we should blame. It’s unfortunate that we are here, but we are here.
This is pointing to an immense failure of Afghan democracy. It points to the failure of diplomacy. It points to the failure of the international aid and assistance.

I think it puts into question all the sacrifices being made by Americans, by our allies, and multiplied by all the Afghans with so much blood, tears, and sweat that we all put into the past 20 years.

BERGEN: Were you surprised by how quickly the Taliban took over much of the country?

RAHMANI: No. I think many people in international community were taken by surprise, but I was aware of the deterioration of morale among our security forces, of the divisiveness of the politics back in Afghanistan. In many places, the Afghan security forces were not supported by Kabul.

BERGEN: Does this remind you of the summer of Iraq in 2014 when ISIS took over and the Iraqi Army didn’t fight?

RAHMANI: Yes, there are certain similarities. Number one, it was the same thing about how the Iraqi leadership ignored the reality of Iraq. They were not an inclusive government. And there was a lack of maturity about the way they conduced politics and military strategy.

BERGEN: There’s a message coming from the White House that President Joe Biden was right, that recent events demonstrate that the Afghan government and the Afghan Army are weak, and the fact that it’s all collapsed so quickly proves that he was correct.

RAHMANI: I do understand President Biden’s position because when he says that if he did this in six months or one year instead of now, there wouldn’t be much of a difference, unfortunately, I agree with that. It wouldn’t be much different. Why? Because, unfortunately, the international community did not broker and enforce a settlement leading to the establishment of a new inclusive government in time, which could have been held together with the help of a peace-keeping mission.

BERGEN: But was it necessary to go to zero US troops in Afghanistan? Because, also, there’s 7,000 other NATO troops that have also left and 16,000 contractors. Was that necessary?

RAHMANI: Of course, that expedited the process of the Taliban takeover at the speed of light. There is no question about that.

BERGEN: You’re the first Ambassador from Afghanistan to the United States who is a woman. Do you think a Taliban-controlled government will be sending women ambassadors in the future?

RAHMANI: No. Based on what I know of them and their actions on the ground, I am afraid that the very basic rights of women are in line to be sacrificed.

BERGEN: Which rights are in danger?

RAHMANI: Access to education, employment, even physical presence of women in the public sphere is not tolerated. I heard that one of the Taliban representatives in Herat was questioned about women working in the administration and in the judiciary, and he said “Oh, that would be a very difficult thing. Women could work only in education and the health care sector.”

So, this is the mentality. What the Taliban are going to offer to women is way below equal citizenship. There’s little reason to think anyone would have citizenship rights under the Taliban, based on previous experience. But even so, women will be treated as a “lower class,” deemed fit only for specific roles and nothing else.

A kinder, gentler Taliban? CNN.com

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)The fall of Kabul to the Taliban is being compared, ad nauseam, to the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese in 1975. Both retreats certainly share some common features — the botched, chaotic evacuation, the abandonment of many US allies on the ground, and the humiliation of the American superpower. But a closer analogue to what is likely to happen in Afghanistan during the coming weeks is to look at what the Taliban did the last time they swept into power in Kabul in September 1996.

Then, the Taliban imposed their “Islamic Emirate” on the population. While this was not the “caliphate” that was declared by ISIS in Iraq almost two decades later, it was similar enough, not least because the leader of the Taliban, anointed himself “the Commander of the Faithful,” which immodestly claimed not only the leadership of the Taliban, but of all Muslims everywhere.

The Taliban imposed their ultra-purist vision of Islam on much of the country. Women had to wear the burqa and stay at home unless accompanied by a male relative.

Music, television and even kite flying were banned. There was no independent Afghan media; only Radio Shariat that blared Taliban propaganda.

In an unsettling echo of how the Nazis treated the Jews, the Taliban forced the country’s miniscule Hindu population to wear distinctive clothing.

These edicts were enforced by the religious police of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

I witnessed black-turbaned vigilantes roaming Kabul’s streets like wraiths dispensing their ferocious brand of “Islamic” justice. Curfew started at 9 p.m., and by 8 p.m. the streets were deserted except for the young Taliban soldiers who stood at every traffic circle, carefully checking passing vehicles. Some of the Talibs wore kohl, a black eyeliner, which was particularly noteworthy since women were banned from using cosmetics.

In Kabul, one of the few diversions available were the well-attended public executions in the former soccer stadium. The victims, including women, were stoned to death or shot in the head.
Vahid Mojdeh, a former Taliban official, noted in his memoir that,

In interviews I conducted with Taliban leaders before 9/11, they defended keeping women at home and shrouded in the burqa by saying these were simply the cultural norms of Afghan culture. But what the Taliban didn’t acknowledge was that these were really the social norms of the Pashtun ethnic group, which made up pretty much the entire leadership of their movement.

For the other ethnic groups in Afghanistan, such as Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks, and the inhabitants of the larger cities, particularly Kabul, Taliban policies were imports from another culture.

The Taliban called it the rule of sharia, Islamic law. In their view, once sharia ruled, Afghans would become virtuous and thus the perfect society would be created. But the Taliban had no real policy to govern. They presided over the total collapse of what remained of the Afghan economy following two decades of war. A doctor I spoke to in Kabul in 1999 said he earned only six dollars a month.

When they were in power before 9/11, the Taliban were pariahs on the world stage. Only three countries recognized the movement of religious warriors, because of their treatment of women, dismal human rights record and their provision of safe haven to al Qaeda.

When Osama bin Laden was forced out of his refuge in Sudan in 1996, he flew to what he hoped to be a new haven, Afghanistan. Once he was in Afghanistan, a Taliban cabinet minister told bin Laden, “We serve the ground upon which you walk.” Another senior Taliban minister told al Qaeda’s leader, “God will never be ashamed of you because you are the champion of the oppressed and you have waged holy war alongside the downtrodden.”

But even the Taliban’s harshest critics before 9/11 could not deny their one achievement: They restored order to much of the country. During the early 1990s, Afghanistan had become a patchwork of fiefdoms held by competing warlords enmeshing Afghans in a brutal civil war. The Taliban defeated most of those warlords and brought law and order at the cost of also imposing a draconian theocracy.

A “new” Taliban?

The Taliban are claiming today that they have changed during the past two decades; that they are a kinder, gentler Taliban.

On Tuesday Taliban officials gave their first press conference since their victory. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid asserted, “The Islamic Emirate is committed to the rights of women within the framework of Sharia.”
“Within the framework of sharia” is the important modifier in this assertion, since the Taliban’s understanding of sharia means that women cannot work outside their homes, except perhaps in some very limited roles, such as working as doctors who treat only female patients.

Also, Taliban officials have sometimes asserted that they favor education for females, yet in areas of Afghanistan that they have seized control of within the past couple of years, this dispensation only extends to girls under the age of 12.

At Tuesday’s press conference, the Taliban spokesman declared a general “amnesty” for enemies of the Taliban. The crowds of thousands of Afghans that are besieging the Kabul airport to flee their country suggest that there is a high degree of skepticism about these claims of amnesty. Indeed, in May the Taliban beheaded Sohail Pardis who was an interpreter for the US military.

On Tuesday a photographer for the Los Angeles Times documented brutal beatings that the Taliban inflicted on women and children outside Kabul airport.

Meanwhile, women have almost completely disappeared from the streets of Kabul, according to CNN’s Clarissa Ward.
Further grounds for skepticism about a reformed Taliban came in a UN report issued in June that described relations between al-Qaeda and the Taliban as “closely aligned.”

In the years before 9/11, many millions of Afghans lived under the yoke of the Taliban’s incompetent, brutal rule. They have good reason today to be skeptical of the “kinder, gentler” Taliban.
Already the armed resistance to the Taliban is forming, led by Ahmad Massoud, the son of the legendary Afghan military commander Ahmad Shah Massoud who was assassinated by bin Laden’s men just two days before the 9/11 attacks.
Joining that resistance is Amrullah Saleh, who on Tuesday said he is the leader of Afghans; a legitimate claim since he was elected to the post of vice president, while former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani has fled the country.

Former CIA Counterterrorism Chief, US set itself up for failure in Afghanistan, CNN.com

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)The Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is being widely characterized as a fiasco. One of the oldest tricks in the Washington, DC, playbook is to dress up a policy debacle as an intelligence failure, and we are hearing plenty of that from senior officials in the Biden administration. On this and other questions, it’s worth hearing the views of Douglas London, who oversaw operations and intelligence in Afghanistan as the CIA’s chief for counterterrorism in south and southwest Asia from 2016 to 2018. London, who served in the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Africa during his 34-year career in the CIA’s Clandestine Service, retired in 2019.

London says the Afghan debacle wasn’t strictly an intelligence failure, but a policy failure that started with the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in February 2020 and the subsequent closing of every US base in the country except in Kabul. Those base closures, which began in earnest in May and ended at the beginning of July, effectively shut down the US’ ability to collect intelligence on the ground during a rapidly changing situation.

London says the collapse of the Afghan government could have been prevented if a relatively small US military contingent remained in place in Afghanistan. Now, the Taliban are likely to hunt down those suspected of collaborating with the US and its NATO allies, despite the official line from Taliban officials that they are granting “amnesty.” And al Qaeda is likely to grow stronger, especially after the Taliban released a number of jailed terrorists from a prison outside Kabul.

London is publishing a memoir of his time at the CIA next month, “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence.” My discussion with London has been edited for clarity and length.

BERGEN: Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs and the top military adviser to President Joe Biden, strongly implied at a press conference on Wednesday that there was an intelligence failure that didn’t predict how quickly the Taliban would take over Afghanistan. Milley said: “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”

LONDON: Gen. Milley receives pretty much the same intelligence as the President. I think it’s a bit disingenuous for the general to say, “Well, I never was told Afghanistan was going to collapse in 11 days.” I’m sure he was right in a very narrow sense. But this wasn’t 11 days in the making.

President Biden clearly said he was going to keep to the agreement that former President Donald Trump made with the Taliban in February 2020, which established a May 2021 deadline for withdrawal. Biden did change the timeline but he said that there would a total withdrawal by the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attack, which the administration later amended to August 31.

The first major US base closings began back in May. The base in Kandahar, which was really the wedge against the Taliban in the south and the southwest, was, at its height, home to more than 26,000 US and international troops. By mid-May, however, the last US troops and whatever remaining intelligence presence had left and the airfield was turned over to the Afghan military.

At the same time the US had any number of smaller intelligence platforms in places that I can’t mention, which are known as “lily pads” — temporary staging areas that we or our partners control that give us the ability to pivot throughout the country — those places closed down as well. By the time the last troops left Bagram Air Base in early July, which was well over 11 days ago, every single base with a US military or an intelligence presence was gone. We were down only to Kabul.

So, it was a lot more than 11 days for the country to dissolve, and I certainly understand where the general is coming from, but unfortunately, it’s a bit of the blame game. It is really convenient to blame the intelligence community, particularly the CIA, because it’s not like the agency is going to run out and show you their classified assessments saying, “But no, here’s what we shared with the general on such and such date.”

BERGEN: In fact, CNN’s Barbara Starr, was reporting on August 12 that there was a window of 30 to 90 days that the intelligence community was positing for the possible fall of Kabul. The difference between 30 days and 11 days is not exactly huge.

When I saw that Ghazni had fallen on August 12, I said on CNN that those intelligence assessments needed to be revised as the fall of Kabul could happen in just days because Ghazni, of course, controls the crucial Kabul to Kandahar highway. To me, it seemed like the game was up.

LONDON: That’s a fair point. I left the service in 2019, but I guarantee you, as events were unfolding, there were daily updates and changes to those assessments. That would be the natural course of events. What intelligence assessments do is they try to avoid crystal-balling. They try to avoid saying, well, “If A happens, in so many days and hours, this will happen.” They give more of a range and a likelihood of how quickly things could collapse, which is why I know even back in my day, we talked about a potential dissolution of the Afghan government and how it could fall in a matter of days if all the circumstances that we faced over the last two weeks occurred.

BERGEN: Of course, even the Taliban themselves probably had no idea that they were going to have this success so quickly.

LONDON: That’s very true. But I think we were particularly vulnerable due to the fact that pretty much from May on, our intelligence collection capability was cut to almost nil in terms of our ability to collect against the broader Taliban presence throughout the country. So we were really flying blind.

BERGEN: If you constantly say publicly, “We’re leaving. We’ve leaving. We’re leaving,” and then you start closing all the bases — the Taliban are not dumb. And the forces opposing the Taliban also then made the calculation; better to live another day.

LONDON: There was no depth of loyalty to President Ashraf Ghani or any government in Kabul, and as the various Afghan warlords saw what was happening, clearly, they weren’t thinking, “Well, we’re going to stand and fight for Ghani until the last man.”

BERGEN: How would you assess Ahmad Shah Massoud’s son, Ahmad Massoud, and Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh? They’re regrouping in the Panjshir valley in the north of Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. As you know, the older Massoud was a legendary commander who fought both the Soviets and the Taliban and was assassinated by al Qaeda two days before 9/11. Will this be another episode in the civil war that has gone on in various forms for more than four decades in Afghanistan? How intense will it be?

LONDON: Ahmad is not his dad. His dad was just an amazing man, and what the older Massoud’s men had in the Panjshir when they were fighting the Taliban before 9/11 was a bigger force than what they have now and a lot more capable. And they had pretty dependable lines of communications across the borders of Afghanistan to neighboring countries such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

None of those things really exist now, But Amrullah Saleh is a smart and capable guy who can mentor the younger Ahmad Massoud.

BERGEN: What about al Qaeda?

LONDON: When Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was asked that question in June, he referred to an assessment that said a US pullout could allow al Qaeda to reconstitute within two years. In light of the Taliban takeover, Austin said that assessment needed to be updated. The earlier assessment was based on several conditions which no longer apply; it presumed an existing government in Kabul would be friendly to us, and that despite an ongoing war between the Taliban and a government in Kabul, there would still be a functioning partner for us on the ground with an ability to project force and collect intelligence.

Now with all bets off — having the Taliban in control — it’s a lot scarier. Clearly, the detainees who were released by the Taliban at Bagram Air Base included a number of al Qaeda personalities, with whom I am very familiar. Many of them were caught in joint military or CIA-supported operations and immediately transferred to Afghan custody upon which they were charged, convicted, and put away. Those folks are force multipliers for the Taliban, and they are likely to regroup what is left of al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

BERGEN: Releasing prisoners was very much what al Qaeda in Iraq and ISIS did in Iraq, right?

LONDON: Oh, absolutely, and they had a lot of talent in those prisons. Just from what I’ve seen in the press, some of the Taliban commanders themselves are among the thousands that were released as part of the February 2020 agreement the Trump administration negotiated. I don’t think anybody in the West, at least in the CIA, had any doubt or question those people would not be back into action, as will the al Qaeda folks.

BERGEN: Could this have been done differently?

LONDON: Well, you got to define the “this” for me.

BERGEN: There are people who say, “This was badly executed,” and then there are others, myself included, who think that there was no real reason to get out at all. So everybody can agree that the execution has been terrible, but was there a better policy prescription that could have been followed by either the Trump administration or the Biden administration or both?

LONDON: I believe that the United States could have maintained a relatively small military and intelligence presence. When I say small, I would have preferred something in the 5,000 range as far as military troops. When Trump came into office, there were around 9,000 US armed forces in Afghanistan. So a force between 5,000 and 9,000, would have ideally kept the status quo because it would have instilled confidence. It would have shored up the willingness of the Afghans to fight, and it would have allowed the US military program to continue training Afghans.

Because the Afghans did fight. An estimated 66,000 members of the Afghan military and security forces were killed over two decades. It’s not like they sat on the sidelines, but they didn’t fight effectively, and they certainly weren’t going to stand up when it was just them against the Taliban and nobody backing them and the US military gone. And this idea that they were going to fight and die for Ghani? That just wasn’t going to happen.

'If the Taliban find me, they will kill me and my family,' says abandoned Afghan interpreter
‘If the Taliban find me, they will kill me and my family,’ says abandoned Afghan interpreter
So could we have done it differently? Obviously, the answer is yes.

BERGEN: How do you feel about all this?

LONDON: Well, as egotistical as I am as a spy, because you kind of have to be for the business, I try not to make this about myself. My sons both served in conflict zones; one son was a Marine who served in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, twice, and another son remains in uniform. I have a daughter who’s taking care of vets with post-traumatic stress disorder.

But I am thinking about, first and foremost, the threat to our nation, because that’s in the blood from 34 years in the CIA. And when I can get beyond that and I start thinking in my heart and soul, it’s about the folks that we’ve left behind, those who are already dead, surely, and their families, those who are on the run and what it means for those people. It’s hard for folks who I worked with and supported and were in dangerous places.
BERGEN: It seems that there are going to be a lot of Afghans who helped the United States who are just going to be left behind.

LONDON: And the Taliban is going to very much focus on finding those people. They’ve always been very effective at maintaining a counterintelligence operation. So, I see reflections of this in the press, about their first order of business for the Taliban will be identifying who was supporting the US, the Brits, and NATO. I really have no faith in their claims of amnesty and this idea that all is forgiven. I think they’re going to very effectively go after these folks.

Now, whether or not they’re going to summarily execute, detain, or “rehabilitate” people remains to be seen. I think because they have become so attentive to media and PR, they might take an approach similar to what the Chinese government is doing by putting Uyghurs in reeducation camps.

Also, not being really a cohesively led military organization either, a lot of these local Taliban commanders are going to do things on their own. They’re going to settle old scores. They’re going to seek revenge against units and intel personnel that targeted them, their leaders, their family members. So that’s not going to end without a fair deal of blood.

Biden deserves blame for the debacle in Afghanistan, CNN.com

Biden deserves blame for the debacle in Afghanistan
Peter Bergen

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN. ”

(CNN)A group of religious warriors, riding on captured American military vehicles, vanquish a US-trained military, which relinquishes much of its power without a fight.
Sound familiar?

That’s what happened in Iraq after the US withdrawal of troops from the country at the end of 2011. Within three years, an army of ISIS fighters was only a few miles from the gates of Baghdad and had taken many of the significant cities in Iraq.

It was then-Vice President Joe Biden who had negotiated the Obama administration’s drawdown from Iraq.

In 2014, after ISIS began ethnic cleansing in Iraq and murdering American journalists and aid workers, then-President Barack Obama reversed that decision and sent additional military support — upping the troop presence to 2,900.

Now Biden is presiding over a debacle entirely of his own making in Afghanistan — and one that has unfolded more swiftly than even the most dire prognostications.

Since Biden announced a total US withdrawal in April, the Taliban have taken over more than one-third of the 34 provincial capitals in Afghanistan, and they now control more than half of the country’s some 400 districts.

The Taliban have also seized control of much of northern Afghanistan, far from their traditional strongholds in the south and east of the country, demonstrating a well-thought-out military strategy. In fact, the Taliban now control the key cities of Herat and Ghanzi, the latter of which is less than 100 miles from Kabul and is located on the most important road in the country — the Kabul to Kandahar highway.

The US State Department is urging all US citizens to leave the country “immediately,” and the Pentagon announced it will send an additional 3,000 troops to assist in US diplomats’ departures and evacuations. Meanwhile, the US government is also considering moving its embassy to Kabul airport. Apparently, the Biden administration doesn’t want a replay of the iconic images of the hasty evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975.

Just as ISIS had done in Iraq, the Taliban is also attacking prisons across Afghanistan and releasing fighters who are joining the insurgency. The Afghan government has said most of these inmates, however, are criminals — sentenced for offenses ranging from drug smuggling to armed robbery.

The Taliban ‘peace’ fantasy

For Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the key US negotiator with the Taliban, and academics like Professor Barnett Rubin at New York University, both of whom promoted the fantasy that the Taliban would seek a genuine negotiated peace deal with the Afghan government, a harsh reality is setting in. The chances of such a deal are next to none.

Khalilzad traveled to Doha this week where he has led “peace” negotiations with the Taliban for the past three years “to help formulate a joint international response to the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.”

Good luck with that. During the last rounds of negotiations that started under the Trump administration, Khalilzad entered into agreements with the Taliban that stated in exchange for a total US withdrawal, they would break with al Qaeda and enter into genuine peace talks with the Afghan government. The Taliban have reneged on those agreements, according to the United Nations and the Afghan government.

Meanwhile, Khalilzad agreed to pressure the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners, several of whom simply rejoined their old comrades on the battlefield once they were released. It’s hard to recall a more failed and counterproductive diplomatic effort. Maybe British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to reach a lasting peace agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938 in Munich on the cusp of World War II?

The withdrawal date of US troops from Afghanistan was initially supposed to be September 11, 2021, but the Biden administration seems to have realized that removing all troops on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, which was masterminded by al Qaeda from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, would not be a PR triumph, and so the new date for the completion of the US withdrawal is August 31.

Nonetheless, when the 20th anniversary is memorialized at the World Trade Center and elsewhere in the US, the Taliban will surely be celebrating their great victory in Afghanistan.

According to reporting by CNN, one US intelligence assessment estimates that the Afghan capital Kabul may be fully surrounded by the Taliban come September 11 — and that it could fall shortly after that.

A global jihadist victory

For the global jihadist movement, the victory of the Taliban will be as significant as ISIS victories were in Iraq and Syria. Just as they did after those ISIS victories, many thousands of foreign fighters are likely to pour into Afghanistan to join the victorious “holy warriors” and receive military training.

There they will join the 10,000 foreign fighters that are already based in Afghanistan from 20 foreign jihadist groups, including al Qaeda and ISIS, according to Afghanistan’s ambassador to the UN, Ghulam M. Isacza.

Was the complete American withdrawal necessary? Of course not. In Iraq, around 2,500 US troops remain in the country — the same number that were in Afghanistan at the beginning of this year. In July, Biden announced an agreement with the Iraqi government that effectively relabeled the American troops in Iraq as “non-combat” service personnel, while still leaving them in place. Biden could have taken a similar approach in Afghanistan. He didn’t.

Why Biden chose one path in Iraq and another in Afghanistan isn’t clear. But what is clear is that a predictable debacle is now unfolding under Biden’s watch in Afghanistan.

THE RISE AND FALL OF OSAMA BIN LADEN” University of Virginia, online

The Colonnade Club

PETER BERGEN RETURNS TO COLONNADE CLUB FOR A VIRTUAL DISCUSSION ON HIS BOOK ” THE RISE AND FALL OF OSAMA BIN LADEN”
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
6:30 PM 7:30 PM
HISTORIC & INTELLECTUAL PROGRAMMING COMMITTEE PROUDLY PRESENTS A VIRTUAL DISCUSSION WITH
PETER BERGEN
Author of the book “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden”.

Tuesday, August 10, 6:30 p.m.

The virtual discussion will be moderated by McGregor McCance

Associate Vice President for University Communication and

Executive Director, UVA Today

Click to learn more about McGregor McCance and his work
As we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, our university, our country and the world look back not only on the attacks of 2001 but also Bin Laden’s death ten years ago in 2011. Our special guest has extensively researched Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and will share his insights with the Colonnade Club.

In The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Peter Bergen provides unique and in-depth insights in the definitive biography of a man who set the course of American foreign policy for the 21st century, and whose ideological heirs we continue to battle today. Peter Bergen describes the dimensions and contradictions in Bin Laden’s life: as a family man, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive. Through exclusive interviews with family members and associates, and documents unearthed only recently, Bergen’s portrait of Osama will reveal for the first time who he really was and why he continues to inspire a new generation of jihadists.

“A compelling, nuanced portrait of America’s erstwhile public enemy

No. 1… Throughout, Bergen turns up revealing details and sharp arguments against received wisdom… Essential for anyone concerned with geopolitics, national security, and the containment of further terrorist actions.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling.” — H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World

PETER BERGEN
Peter Bergen is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows at New America; a professor of practice at Arizona State University; a fellow at Fordham University’s Center on National Security and CNN’s national security analyst. He has held teaching positions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Curator’s Corner: Osama bin Laden with Peter Bergen, Spy Museum DC ONLINE

Wednesday, September 8, 2021
12:00 PM ET

As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approached Peter Bergen sought to reevaluate the man responsible for precipitating America’s long wars with al-Qaeda and its descendants. Bergen produced the first television interview with bin Laden in 1997. He has had years to reflect on and study the man. In his new book The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden he captures all the dimensions of his life: family man, zealot, battlefield commander, terrorist leader, and fugitive.

Join International Spy Museum Historian and Curator Andrew Hammond in conversation with Bergen about the many contradictions he finds in bin Laden and why his legacy lives on despite his failure at achieving any of his strategic goals. Bergen, a Vice President at New America, is the author or editor of nine books, including three New York Times bestsellers and four Washington Post best nonfiction books of the year. He is a national security analyst for CNN and has testified before congressional committees 18 times about national security issues. Thanks to exclusive interviews with family members and associates, and documents unearthed only recently, Bergen has used the knowledge he has gained in the intervening years to discover who bin Laden really was and why he continues to inspire a new generation of jihadists.

Following their discussion, you’ll be able to ask questions via our online platform.

“The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden” by Peter Bergen

Five myths about Osama bin Laden, Washington Post

Outlook

He actually remained close with Taliban leaders — but not so much with Iranian officials.

Peter Bergen is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden,” a CNN national security analyst and a vice president at New America.

Osama bin Laden’s decision to launch the 9/11 attacks made him one of the most consequential figures of the early 21st century. The ensuing “war on terror” cost the United States trillions of dollars and the lives of more than 7,000 American service personnel, and tens of thousands more people were killed in seemingly endless wars around the Muslim world. After 9/11, bin Laden was reviled as a mass murderer but also, in some quarters, celebrated as a hero who had ostensibly stood up to the all-powerful United States. As a result, many myths have proliferated about this man who changed the course of history.
Myth No. 1

9/11 was bin Laden’s brilliant ploy to entangle the U.S. in wars.

The main proponent of this myth was bin Laden himself, who put a post facto gloss on the failure of his actual plan, which was to use the 9/11 attacks to force the United States to pull all of its forces out of the Middle East. When that strategy spectacularly backfired, and instead the United States occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, bin Laden claimed in 2004 that the 9/11 attacks were all along a fiendishly clever plot to embroil the United States in costly wars, asserting in a videotape released by Al Jazeera, “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” Even astute commentators bought this line; Ezra Klein, for instance, wrote in The Washington Post that “superpowers are so allergic to losing that they’ll bankrupt themselves trying to conquer a mass of rocks and sand. This was bin Laden’s plan for the United States.”

In fact, there was no evidence that this was really bin Laden’s plan. Before 9/11, bin Laden was convinced that the United States was a “paper tiger” and that its likely response to the attacks would be an ineffectual round of cruise missile strikes and perhaps some manned bomber raids. He didn’t anticipate that a relatively small group of CIA officers and U.S. Special Forces calling in massive American airstrikes, allied with Afghan militias on the ground, would overthrow his Taliban hosts in only three months.

Indeed, the U.S. response to 9/11 almost destroyed al-Qaeda. According to Abu Musab al-Suri, a longtime associate of bin Laden’s, 1,600 out of the 1,900 Arab fighters living in Afghanistan at the time were killed or captured when the Taliban was overthrown. Saif al-Adel, al-Qaeda’s military commander, similarly concluded that 9/11 had decimated the group, writing to a colleague in 2002, “We are experiencing one setback after another and have gone from misfortune to disaster.”

Myth No. 2

Al-Qaeda and the Taliban would separate after 9/11.

Experts on the Taliban claimed after the attacks that the militants were never really that close to al-Qaeda and had so much to lose from the alliance that, after their fall from power, they’d do the only rational thing and break from bin Laden’s group. A 2012 book by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, “An Enemy We Created,” claimed in its subtitle that the merger between the Taliban and al-Qaeda was a myth. This was also the underlying premise of the peace negotiations that the Trump administration began with the Taliban in 2018. Those talks predicated a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan on the Taliban separating itself from al-Qaeda.

In fact, documents recovered from bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after he was killed in a U.S. Navy SEAL raid on May 2, 2011, show that rather than breaking off contacts after 9/11, the Taliban and al-Qaeda maintained warm relations. They continued to cooperate on military operations, and al-Qaeda even provided funding to the Taliban. In the months before his death, bin Laden wrote a letter to the Taliban’s leader, Mohammad Omar, emphasizing that the United States would soon start to draw down from Afghanistan. Another letter celebrated a 2010 attack conducted by al-Qaeda and a branch of the Taliban against the vast U.S. base at Bagram, Afghanistan, which killed an American contractor and wounded a dozen soldiers.

That friendly relationship persists, according to a United Nations report this year, which concluded that the Taliban and al-Qaeda “remain close.” This explains why the Taliban’s “peace” negotiations with the Trump administration were always a charade — and why President Biden will probably come to regret his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of this month.

Myth No. 3

Pakistan protected bin Laden.

When bin Laden was discovered to be living in Abbottabad, not far from the Pakistani equivalent of West Point, many believed that he must have been protected by Pakistani officials. Then-Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, told ABC News shortly after the SEAL raid that he believed senior Pakistani officials had known of bin Laden’s location. (Levin died this past week at 87.) In 2018, President Donald Trump asserted to Fox News that “everybody in Pakistan knew he was there.”

Yet in the thousands of pages of letters and memos written by bin Laden or sent to him by his closest associates that were recovered in his compound, there is no evidence that he was in contact with Pakistani officials, nor that they had any clue about where he was hiding. After the raid, I spoke on the record to a range of senior U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama; John Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser; and the chairman of the joint chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, all of whom said Pakistani officials had no idea that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad.
Myth No. 4

Iran and al-Qaeda were allies.

Before he briefly became Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn co-wrote with leading Iran hawk Michael Ledeen a best-selling 2016 book, “The Field of Fight.” They asserted that Iran had a “close” relationship with al-Qaeda and that al-Qaeda’s attacks on two U.S. Embassies in Africa in 1998, which killed more than 200 people, were “in large part Iranian operations.” They also claimed that al-Qaeda was working on biological and chemical weapons with Iran. A 2005 Congressional Research Service report noted that the George W. Bush administration believed that Iran was letting senior al-Qaeda figures operate there shortly after 9/11 and that from Iranian soil, the group planned 2003 attacks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

But al-Qaeda’s relations with Iran were quite fraught. After the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, a number of bin Laden family members and al-Qaeda leaders fled to Iran, where they were placed under house arrest. The documents found in bin Laden’s compound show that he was extremely paranoid about the Iranians and was concerned that they might have planted tracking devices on some of his relatives, whom Iran started releasing from house arrest in 2010. The documents also showed that relations between al-Qaeda and Iran were hostile, and there was no evidence in them that they ever cooperated on terrorist attacks.

Myth No. 5

Bin Laden was a blowhard who never fought on the front lines.

Milton Bearden ran the CIA operation to arm the Afghans fighting the Soviets during the 1980s. After 9/11, Bearden was adamant that bin Laden hadn’t personally battled the Soviets, telling PBS that any suggestion that he had been a war hero was “a creation . . . a personal history, that I would submit is just simply wrong.” Similarly, the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who also played a key role in arming the Afghans in that conflict, told the Guardian: “He was not a fighter. By his own admission, he fainted during a battle, and when he woke up, the Soviet assault on his position had been defeated.”

In fact, there are a multitude of witness accounts of bin Laden fighting with almost suicidal bravery against the Soviets. He set up a base in Jaji, in eastern Afghanistan, and took part in a pitched battle there in 1987. Bin Laden’s wartime heroics were documented in two books in Arabic and also by a young Saudi reporter named Jamal Khashoggi, who later became a Washington Post contributing columnist. (Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi operatives in Istanbul in 2018.) After 9/11, bin Laden summoned hundreds of his followers to the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan to fight the Americans. There they holed up in caves for weeks, during which U.S. war planes dropped 700,000 pounds of ordnance. But in the middle of December 2001, bin Laden slipped away, eluding the United States for another decade.

This article is adapted from “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” Five myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on

The Last Days of Osama bin Laden, Wall Street Journal

ESSAY
The Last Days of Osama bin Laden

Revelations from the Abbottabad files show a terrorist leader scrambling for relevance in a world that had moved on

In the first weeks of 2011, Osama bin Laden was worried. For five years, he had concealed himself and his extended family—wives, children and grandchildren—in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, but now it appeared that his carefully constructed hideaway was coming apart. His longtime bodyguards were two brothers, members of al Qaeda whose family originated nearby. They did everything for bin Laden, from shopping in the local markets to hand delivering his lengthy memos to other leaders of al Qaeda.

But bin Laden’s bodyguards had become fed up with the risks that came with protecting and serving the world’s most wanted man. Bin Laden confided to one of his wives that the brothers were “getting exhausted” and planned to quit. Things got so bad that on January 15, he wrote a formal letter to them, despite the fact that they all lived together, acknowledging how angry they were with him and begging them to give him time to find new protectors and a new hideout (the compound was registered in the name of one of the brothers). He set down in writing that they had agreed to separate by mid-July.

Bin Laden never did find a new hiding place, however. He was killed, along with his son, Khalid, his two bodyguards and one of their wives, when U.S. Navy SEALs raided the compound on May 2, 2011. The operation not only rid the world of a terrorist mastermind; it recovered some 470,000 computer files from a trove of ten hard drives, five computers and around one hundred thumb drives and disks.

To understand the man who directed the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, and set the course of American foreign policy for two decades to follow, there is no better resource than these documents—thousands of pages of his private letters and secret memos. Released in full only at the end of 2017, the files reside on the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Among them is a handwritten journal, kept by two of bin Laden’s daughters, that records the last few weeks of his life. Its script is difficult to decipher, so it has previously received scant attention from journalists and researchers. But together with the other Abbottabad documents, it helps to clear up some important mysteries about bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Perplexed by the Arab Spring. During early 2011, in the weeks before he was killed, bin Laden, then in his mid-fifties, was agitated. History seemed to be passing him by. Uprisings swept the Middle East in what became known as the Arab Spring—events that he believed were the most important in the region in centuries. Yet the hundreds of thousands of protestors who risked their lives to protest in Egypt and Libya were not waving his organization’s banner or echoing its call for violent jihad. They were simply demanding basic human rights. Bin Laden was perplexed as to how to respond.

“Is it going to have a negative impact that this happened without jihad?” one of the bin Ladens asked about the Arab Spring.

Fortunately, his oldest wife, Umm Hamza—“the mother of Hamza”—rejoined him in Pakistan at just this time. Bin Laden regarded Umm Hamza as an intellectual peer. She was eight years his senior, with a Ph.D. in child psychology and a deep knowledge of the Koran, and she had spent a decade under house arrest in Iran, since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Now bin Laden believed that she could help him solve a problem: The Arab Spring revolutions were largely instigated by liberals. Could he nonetheless present himself as the movement’s leader?

In the weeks before he was killed, bin Laden held almost daily family meetings in the Abbottabad compound to discuss how he should respond to the Arab Spring. These consultations included Umm Hamza and his second oldest wife, Siham. A poet and an intellectual with a Ph.D. in Koranic grammar, Siham often edited bin Laden’s writings. She and Umm Hamza were his indispensable intellectual sounding board.

Bin Laden’s two daughters took notes on the family meetings, which show bin Laden, his older wives and his adult children puzzling over the striking absence from the uprisings of al Qaeda’s ideas and followers. A family member asked bin Laden, “How come there is no mention of al Qaeda?” Bin Laden answered concisely and a tad defensively, “Some analysts do mention al Qaeda.”

Bin Laden complained to his family that he had released a public statement as far back as 2004 urging his followers to “hold Arab rulers accountable” and that his intervention had been ignored. Umm Hamza said, “Maybe your statement is one of the reasons for the Arab Spring uprisings?” But, of course, it was not. Even bin Laden’s family members were dimly aware of the fact. One of them observed of the Arab Spring’s largely peaceful revolutions, “Is it going to have a negative impact that this happened without jihad?”

On March 10, 2011, bin Laden prompted his older wives and two adult daughters for their insights: “I would like to know your comments on what you saw on the news that you were watching this afternoon,” he said. Bin Laden’s kitchen cabinet told him that he needed to make a big speech for public release. The family firmly believed that bin Laden’s words could change the trajectory of the Arab Spring.

An apology to Muslims.

As part of his public outreach, bin Laden was seriously considering releasing some kind of apology on behalf of al Qaeda and its allies. Not an apology, of course, to the hated Americans. Rather, bin Laden was acutely conscious that since 9/11, groups allied with al Qaeda—for example, al Qaeda in Iraq, al Shabaab in Somalia and the Taliban in Pakistan—had killed many thousands of Muslim civilians and that these exploits had undercut the notion that al Qaeda was fighting a holy war on behalf of all Muslims.

Now bin Laden thought to reposition al Qaeda in the Islamic world as an organization that did not wantonly kill Muslim civilians. He wrote to a top lieutenant saying that he planned to issue a statement in which he would discuss “starting a new phase to correct the mistakes we made.” So badly tarnished had the brand become in bin Laden’s mind that he even considered changing the group’s name. He was seeking a kinder, gentler al Qaeda.

Bin Laden’s proposed rebranding did not extend, however, to stopping planning for terrorist attacks against American targets. As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached, bin Laden was eager to memorialize the occasion with another spectacular strike. He told his lieutenants that he wanted “effective operations whose impact, God willing, is bigger than that of 9/11.” He explained that killing President Barack Obama was a high priority, but he also had General David Petraeus, at that time the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, in his sights. Bin Laden told his team not to bother with plots against Vice President Joe Biden, whom he considered “totally unprepared” for the post of president.

Friends and foes: Pakistan, the Taliban, Iran.

Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad was not far from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. For this reason among others, many observers surmised that bin Laden must have received some support from Pakistani officials or military officers.

Yet the thousands of pages of documents recovered from bin Laden’s compound contain nothing to back up the idea that bin Laden was protected by Pakistani officials or that he was in communication with them. Quite the reverse: The documents describe the Pakistani army as “apostates” and bemoan “the intense Pakistani pressure on us.” They also include plans for attacks against Pakistani military targets.

Al Qaeda’s leaders did contemplate negotiating a deal with the Pakistani government during the summer of 2010. Representatives of bin Laden’s group reached out to leaders of the Pakistani Taliban, who maintained contacts with Pakistan’s military intelligence service, to see if they could negotiate a ceasefire with the Pakistani government. But these negotiations fizzled without yielding a truce.

“The Iranians are not to be trusted,” bin Laden wrote to a top deputy while several of his family members were in Iran under house arrest.

Relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan, on the other hand, remained close. Apologists for the Taliban claim that the group long ago spurned al Qaeda—a premise crucial to the protracted peace talks with the U.S., which required the Afghan militants to reject al Qaeda in return for a complete withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

But the Abbottabad documents make clear that al Qaeda and the Taliban had no intention of severing their alliance. In fact, al Qaeda maintained friendly relations with the Taliban and cooperated with them on military operations and funding. According to the documents, bin Laden’s group kidnapped an Afghan diplomat in Pakistan, released him for five million dollars in ransom and then, in 2010, paid a branch of the Taliban known as the Haqqani Network “a large amount” of that money. One of the network’s leaders, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is now the number two leader of the Taliban.

The Abbottabad documents also help to clarify al Qaeda’s murky relationship with the Iranian government. Some al Qaeda leaders and bin Laden family members, such as Umm Hamza, lived under house arrest in Iran for a decade after 9/11. The documents contain no evidence to suggest that al Qaeda and Iran ever cooperated on any attacks. Instead they show bin Laden’s intense distrust of the Iranian regime and record some incidents that served to stoke it.

For example, according to a memo that an al Qaeda member sent to bin Laden, Iranian Special Forces dressed in black and wearing masks stormed the detention center in Iran where some bin Laden family members and al Qaeda leaders were being held on March 5, 2010. The soldiers beat the detainees, including members of bin Laden’s group. Around this time bin Laden wrote to a top deputy that “the Iranians are not to be trusted.”

Still in charge but unaware of strategic failure.

After the initial U.S. incursion into Afghanistan, many in the news media and intelligence services imagined that bin Laden was living isolated in a remote cave, cut off from the lieutenants who ran al Qaeda offshoots in his name. The Abbottabad documents instead show that even in the final weeks of his life, al Qaeda’s leader was still managing his organization.

Bin Laden was deeply involved in important personnel decisions and provided strategic advice to his followers in the Middle East and Africa. In 2010, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula nominated a Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, as a possible new leader, but bin Laden nixed the appointment. Leaders of al Qaeda in Yemen suggested establishing an “Islamic State” in Yemen. In an undated memo, bin Laden told them the moment wasn’t ripe, and they acceded to his wishes. In a letter he wrote on August 7, 2010, bin Laden urged the Somali terrorist group al Shabaab not to publicly identify itself as part of al Qaeda, and the group complied.

For all his micromanagement, the bin Laden who emerges from the Abbottabad documents is a leader with no awareness that his signature accomplishment, the 9/11 attacks, had spectacularly backfired. Bin Laden made the common mistake of coming to believe his own propaganda: in his case, that the U.S. was a “paper tiger,” that it would pull out of the Middle East following the 9/11 attacks, and that then its client regimes, such as the one in Saudi Arabia, would fall like dominos.

In fact, following 9/11, the U.S. waged military campaigns against jihadist terrorist groups in seven Muslim countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Though these campaigns were certainly costly—to date, some six trillion dollars, more than 7,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths—they are far from the retreat that bin Laden anticipated. After 9/11, American bases proliferated throughout the region, while al Qaeda—“the Base” in Arabic—lost the best base it ever had in Afghanistan.

Only now, two decades after 9/11, is the U.S. finally pulling out of Afghanistan and to some degree Iraq—countries where bin Laden never envisaged a U.S. presence. At the same time, the U.S. continues to maintain substantial bases in countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The 9/11 attacks didn’t end the U.S. presence in the Middle East; they greatly amplified it.

Osama bin Laden was one of the few individuals who can be said to have changed the course of history, but the results were not at all what he had hoped for. In 2011, as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached, his overriding goal was to carry out another spectacular terrorist attack against the U.S. He died knowing that he had failed.

This essay is adapted from Mr. Bergen’s new book, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden,” which will be published by Simon & Schuster on August 3. He is a vice president at New America, a professor at Arizona State University and a national security analyst at CNN.

Mandating vaccines for the military would send a powerful message, CNN.com

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and the author of the forthcoming book, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)A Category 5 Covid hurricane is making landfall in the United States, and the Biden administration must use every tool in its toolkit to blunt its impact — especially if the country is to weather a storm that will likely intensify in the fall should preventative measures not be taken now.

Patients who have contracted the Delta variant of the coronavirus are filling up intensive care units in states such as Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Mississippi — and beyond.

And the reason is simple. The dangerous Delta variant is spreading about 55% faster than the original strain, and it now makes up over 80% of the cases in the United States. Yet, despite this risk, only half of Americans are fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, 97% of Covid hospital admissions are of the unvaccinated.

It’s heartening to hear that President Joe Biden will reportedly announce on Thursday that federal employees and contractors will need to be vaccinated or be frequently tested for the virus if they refuse. Biden should issue a similar order to US military personnel, who are not classified as federal employees, but play a critical role in ensuring the nation’s safety and security.

The military can also be an important role model for those Americans who are hesitant about vaccination. According to a 2021 Gallup poll, 69% of Americans have a significant amount of confidence in the US military — far higher than any other US institution, including the White House or Congress.

Yet, as of the start of this month, only 58% of US Marines had been vaccinated. Other services fare better — the Army is 70% vaccinated, while the Navy is at 77%. But these are the men and women who are sworn to protect our nation, and a sizable minority are still refusing the most basic protection they can offer, which is to prevent the spread of the most lethal virus in a century.

While Covid vaccines remain under the US Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization, somewhat limiting the ability of authorities to compel mandatory vaccinations, the world is in the middle of the greatest public health emergency in our lifetimes and full FDA approval is expected as early as this fall.

Taken together, those may be strong enough reasons for Biden to push the legal limits here and order more than 2 million active duty service personnel and reservists to be vaccinated.

As commander in chief, Biden has great authority over the US military. Unlike other federal workers, US servicemen and women swear an oath that they will obey the orders of their commander in chief, which gives the President considerable leeway to issue vaccination orders. And just think about this: If the President can order military operations where troops may die, he surely can order them to take safe and effective vaccines to protect both themselves and their fellow citizens.

After all, much of the military works in close quarters with each other, and they are routinely ordered to take relevant vaccinations if they deploy overseas. For instance, US service personnel who are deployed in the Central Command (CENTCOM) area of operations in the greater Middle East are required to have vaccinations against anthrax, chickenpox, hepatitis and typhoid. Why shouldn’t they be ordered to get vaccinated during a global pandemic when they are at home?

The reason polio no longer paralyzes many thousands of Americans a year is that polio vaccinations became widespread in the United State in 1955 — and the disease was eliminated in the US by the late 1970s. Today, polio lingers on in places such as rural areas of Afghanistan dominated by the Taliban who have banned inoculations. Do vaccine hesitant Americans want to end up on the same side of history as the Taliban?

Bottom line: Compelling vaccinations in the military is not about taking away their rights, but about their obligations to themselves and to others trying to avoid hospitalization or death from a deadly disease.

Around the world, people are begging to be vaccinated, yet in the US, where we have plenty of vaccines, we do not have enough Americans who are willing to take them. Those who are not getting vaccinated are, in effect, free riding off of those who have been vaccinated, since the larger the pool of vaccinated people, the less chance there is for the virus to proliferate.

That free ride must end, and it should begin with the US servicemen and women who are sworn to protect their nation.