and to ask a couple of young afghan men what they know about nine eleven but this year we're going to. hear. their neighborhood i've only seen them a few more i think of us do they know where it is even we don't know if that's because because your former neighbor heard about anything for the world to guard more stuff coming from. the two young men and clearly never heard of nine eleven. maybe the elders of the local show would have more to say yeah i know you see. this thing i just can see the smoke on the buildings and that's a that's only thing i can see when you guys show this picture and i think i was a cobbler if i just got here i would be surprised but having been here now for six months it's pretty much the stone ages where we are. well what about the reactions . so there was a guy who said it was kabul was clearly never been to kabul it just shows you how isolated there even in your own country people mamma don't understand how come the

only thing i want from what you know you don't think you know you can america panics and come to this point and then get the airplane from here to attack in the united states you know how dumb i. thought it was nice to go from iraq to then here is a lot easier to understand you know why you're here and we do receive your definition of good fisherman yourself is why we're here to see afghans looking at it in this context where the uniformitarian right. we have you back that was. really saying that i'm a fan saying we're going to help you to decide one building and it is how many buildings and they say we're going to help you where is the help. you wake up and what we're seeing to give to our kids going into fighting and they do it to their own kids in a paper that i don't indeed and. i do sympathize or understand what you're some were saying it's even just from the weather we've had recently people lose their homes and nobody to help them so when you have when you can feed yourself or her house yourself are you going to care about somebody you know six thousand miles

away. so i can understand that this is out of out of the top of that if you do that i never thought to ask those questions of anybody here so why we're here amazingly in a country with ten years that was being fooled with nine eleven as its root cools and justification turns out not only with the villages that put us tonight so with the afghan police and even some of the translators working with the u.s. military but you go there with this criticism i know i have no i've never said i want to see these papers before. this is taken in twenty ten by the international council on security and development found that ninety percent of afghan men intelligence and other afghan provinces had no idea what nine eleven was with american troops that start with during this year it seems likely that they will leave afghanistan without the vast majority of afghans ever having really understood why they came in the first place and puts from afghanistan for. all rights i want to bring the ten a colonel tony shaffer back into this conversation

kind of an interesting report as you just saw showing pictures of right terrorist attacks certainly are a lot of these people that live there they're farmers as the one u.s. marine kept right says this is the stone ages on the other hand how had some of these people heard of nine eleven i can't imagine it would necessarily be wise of them to say so your thoughts on this. blog first we don't understand the culture we're dealing with as you just pointed out most of them don't know why we're here there that we're in a country when i was there in zero three we had ten thousand five hundred troops and we were there on a vendetta the afghans we dealt with knew that they saw it as another tribe doing business now because ninety percent of the population they don't even have a watch and so the idea that we're there on a timeline going to do this and the other they don't care there are some interesting things i hope your audience will pay attention to regarding marjah if you recall the beginning of last year or the beginning of two thousand and ten we went into this little area called called margery one of the court of course security market was a fiction it didn't really exist. which took

a government the box. leader that karzai appointed put him in there and when we went in there to ghost to cortical put the government in the afghan people thought we were russians i mean they really thought our troops were russians that's how out of touch they are and that's the problem the afghan people are not ungoverned they're so if government most of them just don't care and now we've become the issue we've we're now fighting a resistance movement most and the other thing that you all have i think of i hope i will remember from this the taliban really don't have the momentum to take over the entire country there are elements there there are competing tribes that the karzai government are not going to be taken over any time soon so i think we need to step out of the way right now we are being seen as the occupiers we need to step out of the way we need to get back on message and task which is to do anti-terrorism operations to prevent threats being able to form and come do bad things in our states we've lost track about the way we're doing the current the

current war so many interesting points that you make there just going into this place that is so tribal and so foreign right you would anyone in and these western countries typically namely america are used to i think that's really really important to bring up. i guess when i ask you this i know that you were on m.s.n. to see just a little earlier today is there anything that you know dylan ratigan didn't ask you that you wish he would and i mean you got it open for him anything that you think we should talk about here. well i think you you all are asking really good questions and three things i guess i would just touch upon real quick is that our is america any safer than we were ten years ago the answer overall is yes but we've we've it's been quite a price to pay is a sustainable know and we need to look at the way forward what are the big threats we have to look at is a car bombs it's always a possibility but that's not what's going to kill us another thing i work on now is something called electromagnetic pulse e.m.p.

and there's coronal mass ejections which you take out the entire power grid as you probably noticed san diego and several outlying areas in arizona work power and with no power last night can you imagine if we lose the power grid here from a cologne coronal mass ejection from magnetic poles can you imagine manhattan without power for thirty days or d.c. so there's real threats natural and manmade we have to look at and this is where we have to be smarter to prevent things from happening bad the future of this is where i think we've not done well and let my last point is by the massive expenditure of resources i think we've lost track of how to judge progress we need to look at things of how you know simply spending money does not get you anywhere and we have to measure effectiveness have we been effective in our investments rather than have we made money is spent money and establish capability capability without being linked to a threat is not really a good capability the money has not been well spent so those are the three points i think i bring up that i would like to talk a little more doubt about earlier today at certainly to our when you were talking

just about the tribal nature of afghanistan i think it's also important to talk about connecting the dots from the past you often talk about connecting about the future we are in libya right now libya a very similar environment and afghanistan just thirty seconds their last what you think of. this anniversary of nine eleven and most important lesson we still need to learn. humility as a country as a nation we were founded on certain principles that we have to live and be live the example of we we should be looking at how we can set the best example in the world by leading by being better by trying to be not so much in other people's spaces but try to find out what the issues are and i'm not saying up the force of the several times i'm not anti-war i'm anti stupidity we have to be smarter and much more efficient our application of deadly force are not in our songs from history that's really really good advice i think it's kind of colonel anthony shaffer senior

fellow at this and i have your advanced defense studies in our new york studio unfortunately we are out of time i want to thank you so much for watching we will be back here at seven pm and christine for sound of. the official. pulled from the. video. on the t.v. george called. download

the official application to i phone on pod touch from the i choose apps to. life on the go. video on demand parties minefield comes an r.s.s. feeds now in the palm of your. question on the comm. can. lead. to. a low and

welcome across talk i'm peter lavelle the nine eleven decade what has been accomplished what has been lost as america's so-called war on terror maybe us in the world a safer place and one of the huge costs and loss of innocent life has it all been worth it. can the story live. to cross-talk america's war on terror i'm joined by david ignatius in washington he's a journalist and author and rochester we have john miller he is a professor at ohio state university and in london we crossed the n.s.a. i think pretty he is c.e.o. of the cordoba foundation all right gentlemen this is crosstalk that means you can jump in anytime you want and it's i very much encourage it but first let's take a look at some of the questions facing america on this anniversary. this year marks a decade since al qaeda september eleventh attacks on the united states as america and the rest of the world commemorate the day it is the decade of the events that

followed which poses the hardest questions and calls for a look back from the passing of the contentious patriot act to the war in afghanistan and iraq the answer to nine eleven has involved a vast effort to root out transnational extremism and cheerful president george bush famously the war on terror the war on terror. begins with out. but it does not in there it will not end until every church group of global reach has been found stopped and defeated a decade later the system set up to keep america safe involves more than one thousand government organizations and nearly two thousand private companies specializing in counterterrorism across the united states and this comes with a number of the price tag eighty billion dollars spent in total intelligence gathering last year alone and over one trillion dollars spent so far on the wars in

iraq afghanistan and other war on terror operations given the staggering financial costs and america's steadily declining economic power all of those begs the ultimate question has the u.s. achieved the goals that it sought the war on terror has the ability to allow the u.s. to carry out military operations that since two thousand and one have taken the lives of more than a million civilians. in iraq and afghanistan now in libya and of course that leads to an escalation of resistance of hatred of revenge and so in terms of keeping the american people safe that's a ridiculous notion but then again since nine eleven america has avoided any large scale attacks on its soil eliminated talkable qaeda leaders and enhanced its domestic security network whether these gains warrant the cost remains to be

determined as america draws conclusions and learn some lessons come this anniversary my chair in a for cross talk our team. so if i'm going to and i said in london first you know ten years on. fighting this war on terror and still the term is still used and it's what are you thinking about most ten years on is the world a safer place is america safer place. well before i answer that question or not wanting to put a downer on this particular theme i think we ought to avoid falling into the you know the mistake of making out as though the events of ten years ago as tragic and as momentous as they were as being the most tragic events all the most important point of our more modern history or indeed the beginning of history as many politicians and particularly within the american administration of

past have made out to be nine eleven was indeed a very momentous events because of the implications and because of the implications carried out in the actions carried out. specifically by the american administration what i recall ten years ago and i'm sure that most people also recall this there was a particular moment immediately after the fall of the towers when i had the feeling that the entire world almost came together and shared a moment of shock of horror and possibly even support and solidarity that was a moment that if it were captured i think that today would have been talking about an entirely different thing unfortunately a few hours only a few hours after the fall of those towers we went on i.e. the american administration went on a tangent a totally different approach and that moment of world solidarity was absolutely

scuttled it's very interesting and even if i go you know in washington robert fisk famously said in just a girl from what we just heard is that the americans demand the world know our gates but we don't we don't know their dates and their tragic history and i'm looking at a neocolonial our experience with north africa is experience for the last century and a half so i mean in reflecting upon you know this is a tangent do you think that is actually a correct way of looking at it because it sounds like a huge strategic mistake. well i think you can think of nine eleven as a shock to you know united states into the global system that the u.s. was the dominant player and and the shock produced erratic policy and that i think most people would conclude that a lot of damage to the united states to its alliances to certainly the country's reputation as i look at president obama who inherited the bush years of

reaction to nine eleven i was struck by two things first i think obama has tried since he became president to lower the rhetoric you do hear less talk about a war on terror and the french it endless struggle against terrorists wherever they are and you do see an effort by obama to work to improve us our alliances the effort to reset as that term as the relationship with with russia i think is one of the significant policies that obama embarked on right at the beginning of his term in the u.s. needed more friends than it had and he said that to change policy so as to get them at the same time that obama has been using i think quieter rhetoric has been trying to work better with allies he has been very aggressive in secret in his attempts to

destroy. the raid on the compound of us osama bin laden that resulted in his death out may second as an example i was a very tough operation it's a decision that george bush might have taken but i'm told by people who were close advisors that he might not of obama sharply stepped up the pace of predator drone attacks not just over the tribal areas in pakistan but and several other countries in addition so i think you have an interesting picture with open. president who is trying to change the rhetoric the terms of the hard nosed reality this battle against our credit it's it's it's as tough as well you know it won't go to john i mean if the rhetoric has changed but their actions have not so there is not a big difference between obama and bush and a lot of people would say the war on terror to date has not been successful it's been terribly expensive and it is only hurt the security interests of hundreds of

millions of people around the world i mean i think we it's kind of generally accepted there's been some huge strategic mistakes made here but from what we just heard you just continue go ahead john. yes i basically agree with it it's been a massive misallocation of effort that the attacks on nine eleven cost perhaps two hundred billion dollars including the loss of life a lot of the buildings and the economic impact from it and that's a great tragedy but since that time the united states has spent increased expenditures on home domestic homeland security expenditures about a trillion dollars and debate and overseas that the wars are costing several trillion dollars so it's a spent and of course more americans have died in iraq and then died on nine eleven the midwest and it seems to come from me as is the most important and most effective counterterrorism strategy is to not overreact some of the things that david talked about i think are quite useful namely going after the guys who

actually get it with your own or without drones but much of the rest of the expenditure is basically simply thrown at the problem without any sensible analysis if you're dealing with the issue of are we safer or the way to put it is this of course we're safer we hired some more security guards if you if you built a tsunami wall around moscow moscow would be safer from tsunamis now the question is is that a sensible form of expenditure in the case of the united states the american and americans chance of being killed by a terrorist of any form is about one in three point five million per year and the question then is not are we safer but how much more money do you want to throw at the problem for make that probability even lower and it's may go back to you in london but the way bush preceded and probably to some extent also obama isn't it wasn't the the war on terror if we can say with that term always going to be perceived as anti muslim in the arab world because you know we have we have now we

have three countries ok we have we have iraq we have afghanistan we have libya ok this is again it's this the perception coming out of washington western capitals is one thing but the perception has always been very different on the ground for the people experiencing these invasions. absolutely and if i may start by coming back toward john just said i absolutely concur with everything he said but on the question of whether we're safe or not i agree with him yes we may be safer because as he put it we hired more guards and more security cameras but actually if you go around ask people individually they're more scared so it's quite an anomaly of the kind of world that we created we fought this war on terror but we've created even more terror for even more people on a far wider scale whilst the attack was in a particularly small geographical location we've managed to create an impact that is far reaching to every single inch practically of the world and that is i think

where we have gone terribly wrong as i said at the very beginning there was a moment when we could have actually fought this up horan's ideology of al qaida in a totally different way what we managed to do unfortunately is to actually spread it is to actually recruit for al qaeda over the past over the past ten years i've said this time and again peter and possibly one time on your program in the past before nine eleven i frequented and prayed at a mosque where after prayers people would on a rag sell tapes for them for about fifty cents and no one would buy immediately after nine eleven he became a hero and though that same tape was going for ten dollars and people would be searching for more we're going to jump in right here we can do a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on nine eleven a decade on but stay with. the case. if

you want to. when you look for nuclear winter against all odds. in human blood disease measured in barrels. will brain is most. any have new ideas. new. orleans. has more news today violence is once again flared up. and these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada after. china for asians or the day .

can. still. come across our computer logo to mind you were talking about the nine eleven hijackers. david thank you george bush he pushed his war on terror and it's become very much a part of the american political and military establishment is that the war on terror was a per day another way of promoting democracy we could have a different discussion about it can you invade a country and force democracy out of that's that's one thing but i think the arab spring or the arab awakening release says a lot because you don't need outsiders to invade your country to get rid of

dictators if the west would stop it promoting dictatorship dictators in that part of the world people will rise up and they will have their own democracy and so this whole effort of democratization really the people on the ground pour cold water on what george bush and and others try to do. well i think george bush is a pretty easy whipping boy he's no longer president barack obama faced with a difficult strategic decision about whether to abandon close to mubarak when a well and useful wildlife united states decided that it was appropriate to abandon him that the egyptian people wanted change and that any american effort to resist that would be inappropriate he got strenuous arguments from close u.s. allies from israel from saudi arabia saying for goodness sakes what are you doing sir don't do that and he want to have because he thought it was the right policy so i think you need to be a little bit careful about about about the way you're setting up the question here

our conversation in general reminds me of something we all know which is the the use the famous a lot of character cards history is best understood backwards but has to be lived forwards in other words. in the immediate aftermath of two thousand and one which analysis has reminded us was that moment of hope and consolidation nobody really knew what was what was happening and the it is clear now that the information that the bush white house was receiving was terrifying it was the information about chemical or biological attacks attacks on subways this and that and i think it's clear that they overreacted but it is important i think to remember the context in which they were making decisions which was the before good the uncertainty of this war in which they suddenly found themselves i think it's taken the united states years now to begin to get a better perspective and to get some balance in this policy and i i do think that's

returning. and somebody covers the subject up and i find people with more clarity about about the importance of not going out making enemies and not doing a traditional american style of leadership charging up a hill or shouting about a war on terror you don't hear that from president obama for a reason so i guess i would say that. with the with the perspective of ten years if we've learned nothing if we really were just you know plodding along the same direction. please well i think maybe a lot of people in pakistan would probably disagree with that but if i go to you john what would you think it was the united states and its allies just wanted to remake the world in its own image it's almost like a messianic vision of the world we can change being change the entire region with the invasion of one country to have this domino effect and in retrospect and you know i'm used to i was a trained as

a historian ok i know what history is i mean in retrospect it was just a fool's errand in a lot of people lost their lives and the us is more or less bankrupt itself through this kind of messianic vision and it's still elements of it are still there go ahead john. you know they're still there though i certainly agree with david that the rhetoric has been toned. substantially in general in terms of promotion of democracy the best thing the united states could as ever done is simply be an example when the revolutions that place in eastern europe after nine hundred eighty nine united states cheered them on in a mostly took place by themselves in latin america became democratic after one hundred seventy five united states again was just sort of in a in a cheering position and also that it made a change changes in east europe in east asia such as in south korea and in taiwan with respect to david's point which i think is a very good one about the sort of hysteria that gripped the country right after nine eleven i think is absolutely right there were intelligence estimates at the

time that were that there were five thousand al qaeda agents running around loose within the united states now that was basically off by about five thousand in addition people are explorer expecting additional. reactions in terms of many nine eleventh's so the initial concern was quite quite reasonable but after a couple of years you think they start to be some reevaluation and after five years of this with nothing happening essentially even more so and when but obama came in i really hope that now that was almost as eight years after that there would be some initial reevaluation but we still got basically the same policies continuing on i just finished the coauthored book with a scandalous an engineer named mark stewart called terror security and money and we tried to look at these homeland security expenditures and what is coming out of the program homeland security had both before and after the obama administration is continued hype of the threat let me just give you one quick example six months ago

the secretary of homeland security janet napolitano held a press conference and she said we now think that the likelihood of a major attack and major coordinated attack like al qaeda like nine. lebanon is lower however we still have to worry about small disorganized attacks therefore we are more in more danger than we've ever been before there's a we got rid of the big thing we continue to small thing and somehow that makes us more dangerous that's a kind of a responsible hype that continues to come out of the the white house and coming from out of the administration there's still people in the obama administration who are saying that al qaeda that pathetic ridiculous al qaeda presents an excess stench of threat to the united states that it will it could potentially destroy a country of three hundred million with a massive g.d.p. cetera and no one ever basically still no.