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[Note: A transcript of this meeting is unavailable. The discussion is summarized below.]

October 10, 2001

Not for Attribution

On October 10, 2001, the Council’s National Program continued its Conference Call Series on America’s Response to Terrorism with members from across the country and around the world.

General Barry R. McCaffrey led off with brief remarks on the military role in the ‘war’ on terrorism, and Michael P. Peters, Senior Vice President of the Council on Foreign Relations, chaired the session.

General McCaffrey is the Olin Distinguished Professor of National Security Studies at the United States Military Academy and served as the Drug Czar in the later years of the Clinton administration.

This summary report was adapted from the original transcript.

General McCaffrey made the following points in his opening remarks:

• The United States has entered an era that we have never encountered before. An era in which we live with the kind of insecurity that is commonplace in much of the world. The challenge is to retain a fundamental commitment to our Bill of Rights, to the rule of law, to our rights of privacy, to free movement, and more importantly, the rights of foreigners living in our midst.

• The most useful tool in the international arena will be law enforcement cooperation. The front line troops in this war are Interpol, the FBI—global intelligence services whose enforcement agents will have to identify, arrest the couriers, stop the flow of money, the movement of arms and explosives, and disrupt the front organizations.

• In the near term, U.S. armed forces and our allies can play a role in neutralizing, disrupting, and destroying terrorist base areas, specifically in Afghanistan. The armed forces will play a central role in keeping the terrorist leadership and bases focused on their own survival; preventing them from having the time and the intellectual energy to regain control of their worldwide network and plan further terrorist assaults.

• The central component of this struggle will be to build multinational cooperation. Multi-national cooperation should be an easy thing to achieve, even though many States are under different internal constraints in their behavior.

• There will be a diplomatic, economic, and political attempt to tell the seven identified state-sponsors of terrorism that they must confront the terrorist organizations that they are hosting and there will be positive and negative consequences. It will be very easy to deal with the terrorist base areas in the Sudan, and most likely easy to deal with the Cubans and the Libyans. Others will be extremely tough, but vital. We must convince the Syrians and the Iranians not to act as host for organizations that have attacked U.S. interests.

• There will be no solution in Iraq that doesn’t involve the direct confrontation of values or issues they hold dear. We may end up telling the Iraqis “here are the consequences, and they include dismembering your military and your political regime if you don’t respond.”

• The United States has an incredibly incoherent way of organizing our Federal air, land, and sea border agencies that deal with foreign agencies to control the movement of people and material across our frontier, and it will have to be restructured over the next one to five years.

General McCaffrey addressed the following questions in the session:

Question from MA: Can the war on terrorism be compared to the war on drugs? Is this metaphor helpful or unhelpful and perhaps counter-productive on the political and diplomatic front?

• In thinking through the problems of confronting drug abuse and its consequences—medical, legal, international, criminal—it is more helpful to use a metaphor of cancer as the intellectual construct to understand the issue instead of a “war” on drugs.

• The struggle against terrorism can be more usefully understood from the dimension of the struggle against drug abuse than say Desert Storm. This is not going to be primarily a military issue, but a diplomatic, an economic, a political, and an international leadership challenge. The military can obviously be an important component of the strategy, but even then it will stand behind international law enforcement and intelligence cooperation.

Question from PA: How should we reconcile the short-term requirement for avoiding more terrorist incidents such as the tragic one experienced on September 11, with the long-term requirements for exterminating the root causes of terrorism?

• We have no option but to start our long-term and our short-term actions at the same time. And we won’t be allowed the privilege of coming up with a clean-cut intellectual construct to begin with. We’ve got to begin from where we are.

• If we don’t get civil aviation up on its feet we’re in trouble. A huge piece of America started economically dying with September 11 and some of our economic partners have encountered the same things. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, cabs, etc. are going because they are fundamentally dependent on our civil aviation industry working efficiently, cheaply, and safely.

• We can protect that system through a series of deterrent measures. We need federal authorities as the screening system, putting Air Marshals on every flight. We need to arm the cockpit crew, pay them $250 a month, give them a class, and swear them in as deputy U.S. Marshals.

• Other things are going to be very difficult because they involve building infrastructures. There is no credible U.S. domestic capability to do reconnaissance and decontamination of radiological, biological, and chemical hazards. We have a terrific capability in the U.S. Armed Forces. The U.S. Army can operate combat under active attack from persistent and vapor nerve agents, but no such capability exists in our civilian population so we’re going to have to build that.

• We have to restructure our National Guard—right now it has the wrong force structure and the wrong doctrine.

• We have to be careful to protect our domestic privileges and our rights while at the same time giving our protective agencies the tools they will need to root out incredibly lethal threats.

Question from AL: Are attacks against Iraq next? What would be the argument of the international community and how could we conceivably sustain a coalition?

• The current regime in Iraq is one that is essentially criminal in nature against its own population. It’s been a threat to the region and continues to be. It’s an active sponsor of terrorist organizations. It still possesses weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical weapons, scuds and other missiles, and is within 5 years of producing nuclear weapons again. The oil embargo has completely failed, so within five years we should expect that Iraq will have multiple nuclear weapons.

• We have to come up with a strategy—political, economic, and military—to change the regime. Iraqis aren’t going to be able to change their one-man rule; therefore military power will probably play a role to reduce the threat of Iraq.

Question from CA: How have other countries dealt with terror on their own soil for decades, like Israel? How do we assess the level of sophistication of the terrorist network of Al Qaeda?

• These people completely lack sophistication, training systems, and human trust around the regions. They have modest communication capabilities, no research capability, and are forced to operate in a base area. These are a people whose world view is purist, ignorant, and dangerous. The fact that they are willing to die is not particularly unusual; there are all sorts of people willing to die for what they believe in.

• One of the problems is that in operating against open, democratic societies with no controls over borders, the terrorists have a huge advantage. Our challenge is to lower the level of insecurity in the coming eighteen months to five years.

Question from Canada: How do we actually get bin Laden and his people there if we don’t put our military on the ground? If the Russians couldn’t win in Afghanistan, what makes us think that we can? The United States thought they could do in Vietnam what the French couldn’t do. Are we at risk of the same analogy?