Shaping the Narrative: How Journalists Covered the Global War on Terror

Panelists discuss the role of journalism in shaping public understanding of terrorism at home and abroad following the 9/11 attacks, assessing how the media’s coverage in the aftermath and throughout the global war on terror shifted the national security and foreign policy landscape.

This meeting is part of the series, Twenty-Five Years Later: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror, which examines how the legacy of the 9/11 attacks and the war on terrorism continues to shape U.S. foreign policy, domestic security, global affairs, defense strategy, and national security. 

PANDITH: Good afternoon, everyone. Nice to see you. My name is Farah Pandith. And, together with my colleague Bruce Hoffman, we would like to welcome you to our series on the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11. Today’s conversation, as you know, is going to be about shaping the narrative. And we’re very, very fortunate to have two incredible people with us today. I want to begin with brief introductions of both of them.

The first is Alan Cullison. Alan Cullison is the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal Europe in Moscow starting in February 1999. Alan first joined Dow Jones & Company as a national copyreader in New York for AP/Dow Jones, a newswire of the Associated Press and Dow Jones, in December 1993. In June of 1995, he moved to Moscow as a reporter and, in May ‘98, became the newswire’s Moscow’s bureau chief. He covered the war in Afghanistan for the Journal, for which he shared in a Hal Boyle citation from the Overseas Press Club for the Journal’s series, “America’s War on Terrorism in 2002.” After the fall of the Taliban, Alan discovered two computers belonging to al-Qaida’s office in Kabul. Working with two other computers, he was part of a team that then produced the series Inside al-Qaeda that won the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Overseas Reporting in 2003. From 1986 through November 1993, he worked for the Stamford Advocate, the Hartford Courant, and Random House, successively. Welcome, Alan.

CULLISON: Thank you.

PANDITH: I’m also very pleased to have with us today Linda Robinson. Linda is the senior fellow for women and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, where she writes about women’s political and economic leadership, the relationship between gender equality and democracy, technology facilitated violence, and current international affairs. She was previously a senior international researcher and director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation. She is a former foreign correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, and a senior editor at Foreign Affairs. Her books include Masters of Chaos, a New York Times bestseller; Tell Me How This Ends, a Foreign Affairs bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of 2008; One Hundred Victories, about Afghanistan; and Intervention or Neglect, about Central America. Her latest book, highly recommend to people, Women in Power: Fighting for Democracy in an age of Authoritarianism. It spotlights the current cohort of women political leaders and tells the powerful stories of the women on the front lines of the battle between democracy and authoritarianism. She received the Gerald R. Ford Prize for reporting on national offense and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for reporting on Latin America. She served as chair of the U.S. Army War College Board of Visitors and in other government advisory positions, and has testified before Congress on multiple topics including special operations, the Iraq War, and, of course, the Middle East.

Welcome to both Linda and Alan. Please join me in welcoming them. (Applause.)

ROBINSON: Thank you.

PANDITH: OK. You can see why we have them here today. We are going to start with a question that we ask at every—at every convening of this series. And perhaps we can start with you, Linda. Where were you on the morning of September 11, 2001? And what came to your mind when you saw what was taking place?

ROBINSON: Thank you so much, Farah and Bruce. And I’m so happy that you’re doing this series at the council, and taking the chance to look back and think about the lessons of where we’ve been. I, on the morning of 9/11, just happened to be doing a course in the Shenandoah Mountains called the Hostile Environments Course. And it was in—I was in the middle of a hostage scenario. So we were taken hostage on a school bus with bags over our head, driven around, and had to play through this scenario. And we took the bags off our head. And this was aid workers and journalists, were primarily the people attending this. And we took off the bags. We had a little break. Had a debrief. And we were checking our phones and found out that the World Trade Towers had been hit and the Pentagon. And so everyone jumped in their cars and raced back to D.C.

I had been doing the course in preparation for going to the field with the special operations forces. But it was planned to be in Colombia, which I had spent a decade in Latin America as a reporter with insurgencies and so forth there, among other—many things happening in Latin America. So I just realized, now I’m going to be going to Afghanistan, not Colombia.

PANDITH: Alan, where were you?

CULLISON: I was in Moscow, where I was based with the Wall Street Journal, at that point. And like a lot of people around the world I just happened to start seeing it on television live. And hence, since my experience was somewhat like everyone else’s, I won’t go into that. I think probably the most—some of the most vivid recollection I have about it was immediately afterwards. You know, the Journal’s offices were actually destroyed in New York so there was a lot of scrambling about what to do. And I remember there was a particularly bad idea from an editor to go to Brussels and cover the impact of the insurance industry on, you know, 9/11, and that there was an idea circulated that I do that. (Laughter.) And so what I did for the next forty-eight hours was avoid the telephone and hide from my computer. And instead, I sort of—I huddled with other reporters from Moscow looking for a way to get into Afghanistan.

At that time, there was a big stream of journalists around the world just trying to—trying to get to the borders. You could go to Pakistan. You could go to Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. One of my colleagues went to Uzbekistan. Steve LeVine and Danny Pearl went to Pakistan. And I ended up going to Tajikistan, which fortunately had a more porous border than a lot of places. There was a—it’s kind of an ideal place for covering the beginning of the invasion, because there was fighting right over the border. One could go back and forth and write about the shooting, and file it.

But, yeah, another salient event was that there were rumors at the Journal about layoffs because of the impact of September 11. And I was at the embassy or the representation of the Northern Alliance, which was the Mujahideen group fighting the Taliban at the time. And they said, you can go over the border here, or there’s another place you could go which is over the Hindu Kush, closer to Kabul and the Panjshir Valley. But if you go over there, after you cross the Kush there’s a very good chance it’s going to snow and you’ll not get out. And so that’s where I decided to go. It was the safest place to go, in light of the layoffs. And sure enough, it snowed and I got stuck there and was covering the war when the front broke. I like to characterize it as journalistic genius that I was there, but as you can hear I had some ulterior motives.

PANDITH: Before we turn to Bruce, I just wanted to follow up on, you came back to Washington. Which part of the war were you going to then cover? I mean, and did you travel to Afghanistan? You said you were not going to go to Central Asia—I mean, Central America, but you were going to go—

ROBINSON: Yes. Well, and I’d actually spent the previous year between Latin America as a Nieman fellow at Harvard. And I spent most of the time—the special forces had said, if you read everything on this bibliography and come back to us, we’ll consider you coming out in the field with us. I actually knew a lot about Colombia, so I knew there was going to be—they also would benefit from my knowledge of Colombia. I’d been out with the FARC. I’d been with Columbian military, and so forth. So they were preparing for me to go there. And so my editor, Brian Duffy, said, you are going to be—your mission is to get with the SOF wherever they are, however you can. And that would be true then also of Iraq.

And so I didn’t—I really had gone into this with the idea of understanding Latin America, which I think is still an important region, but it wound up being my next twenty years was really doing the SOF beat, if you will. But I was assigned to go there. And my flight in was through Pakistan, on a U.N. flight carrying—I sat next to a midwife. And she was schooling me on everything I would need to learn about navigating the very complex Afghan society, which we can talk about more.

PANDITH: Terrific. Thank you so much.

HOFFMAN: So, moving ahead, what were your respective impressions during the first months of the war on terrorism? As you were covering it, did they conform to any prior expectations you had? And also what do you think was missing in the reporting during that critical period?

CULLISON: Is that mean first? Well, I mean, I think I had a somewhat unusual view of it, because being stuck in the Panjshir Valley, I was watching the B-52 strikes come in and pulverize the Taliban positions. And it looked like a very, very, of course, strong response, and satisfying on an emotional level. And I guess, in retrospect, I worry that a lot of what we wanted at the time was revenge. And it certainly satisfied me. I think that what unfolded afterwards, you know, when it came to the coverage, was—I think it’s—in order to understand what worried me about it, I guess I’d have to characterize the way we—bring us back to the way we used to cover wars. And that was really to be on the ground along with a lot of the people engaged in them.

I mean, when I was in Russia I covered the war in Chechnya by speaking to Chechens. And in Afghanistan, I was living with the Mujahideen. I think that the early parts of the war were actually some of the most interesting because that was before journalists really got separated from the people that they were covering. And gradually, gradually that distance—you know, the reporting became more formalized, and, I think, more distant and less interesting.

HOFFMAN: You were with the Northern Alliance as they stormed across the country, right? And what’s your salient memory from that period?

CULLISON: Well, of course, it was getting the hard drives. There was a race—a race quickly transpired between the New York Times and me on getting any information you could out of Afghan—or, out of al-Qaida houses in Kabul. We had arrived in Kabul before U.S. forces. And so what they did was they went after documents, and were quickly putting together documents from—you know, stories based on the documents that they found in files there. I had had a bit of a mishap going over the Hindu Kush. The truck that I was riding in lost its brakes and rolled. And my laptop computer was destroyed. So I happened to know quite a few computer people in Kabul. There weren’t any computers, for the most part, in Afghanistan, because there was no electricity. But anyone who owned a computer tended to be rather interesting. They tended to be, frankly, from al-Qaida.

So I contacted a lot of looters and had them bring in whatever loot they had. And the two drives that I got, one of them ended up belonging, essentially, to Ayman Zawahiri, and the other one belonged to Muhammad Atef, who was the military commander at the time. So what I ended up doing was a very detailed reconstruction, along with my colleague Andrew Higgins, on the history of al-Qaida up through, you know, ’98—’97-’98 up until and right after September 11.

HOFFMAN: Linda.

ROBINSON: So my thoughts coming into this, as I briefly alluded to, was there was going to be a lot of on-the-job training for everyone—journalists, as well as military, as well as diplomats. Because, I mean, the complex terrain of Afghanistan can’t be overstated, but also the relative dearth of experience in that land. And the terrain is the tribal, ethnic, Dari, Pashtu, the rugged physical terrain, the urban-rural divide. And I wound up spending a lot of my time in the Pashtun side, but just the divisions between Tajik/Uzbek, you know, within the non-Pashtun community, and all of the complexities that would present itself, the ramifications of Karzai—picking Karzai as the horse to back, and then later, of course, Abdul Ghani.

And I think that—I’d just make one other comment. As I got more immersed in in my book about Afghanistan was later in the war, but understanding that human terrain, as I think we’ll talk about more, is just critical. It’s not just a military operation. You’re operating in a specific environment. And if you don’t understand that environment, you’re not going to succeed. That’s still my belief. But really, what I saw as the pivot point was March 2002, when with the Roberts Ridge/Takur Ghar clash. And it turned from a CIA soft operation—the conventionalization of the war began from that point on, with footprint moving in larger, 10^th Mountain headquarters. And the conventionalization had many manifestations.

And then when I wrote my book, though, this was when General Petraeus came out. And he was enamored of this idea the special forces were touting of village stability operations and really getting very local, working with tribal elders, forming these local defense forces at a scale that hadn’t been done since Vietnam. But also, trying to understand the real conflicts there were less about al-Qaida than these tribal, and drug trafficking, and all these things that were making people sign up with the Taliban. And where I was the whole time for that book, that was basically Taliban country. And so I was not surprised when they came roaring back to power.

PANDITH: Could I ask a follow-up on that? Because—and I just I’m scanning the room. For those of you who are online, we have a very rich audience, a lot of whom know something about Afghanistan. Can you just raise your hand if you actually have been to Afghanistan or worked on it? So more than half the room that has their hands up, one. Two, when you talk about what it meant to be in Afghanistan, I’m really curious, Linda, as a female, how you navigated through that. And, two, for those of you who have not been to Afghanistan, when you are talking about tribal things, it is very hard for Western, American viewers to understand what that actually means, when you say there are tribal differences. Can you go a little bit into detail about those two aspects? I’m sorry, but I think it’s important because it helps to—it helps to contextualize what it is that you are saying.

ROBINSON: Yes. Yes. Wow. You know, this is—these are all Ph.D.-level questions that would take a long time to answer, but let me try to do it a bit of justice. First, on the gender thing, it was quite—well, I mentioned the midwife. And she immediately said, you need to get different clothes, and you need to have your top layer covering down to your knees. And then I had the good fortune to have an interpreter who spoke both Pashtu and Dari. And he helped me navigate. And he got me to the market. And he said, no, you really need to dress in this way if we’re going out to Khost, Paktia, Paktika, these places. You need to really conform to the mores of this society.

And then later on, when I was going out to these villages and doing my book, One Hundred Victories, the fact that I was going out with the ODAs, the special forces teams, and meeting these elders, they were my—if I was with them, they were like, OK, well, she’s a woman, but, OK, we’ll let her sit in the circle with the men and, you know, the—(inaudible)—all of that. So I was more or less accepted as one of them, because of that entree. The women and the introduction of combat support teams, and all of that, was another complicated wrinkle, because that was a way for the forces to access intelligence from the female side of the population. But of course, women in kit with guns and all of that, that was a very strange and scary thing for most Afghan women. So it was a mixed bag. But I was just, you know, obviously a gringa. (Laughs.)

PANDITH: Do you want to say anything about the localized piece, before I ask my next question? I didn’t want to—

CULLISON: The localized piece? Well, I mean, I think that the complexities there were just so rich that hardly—I mean, I think there were very few of us who could really describe them. I mean I think even on the level of all the translators and the fixers who we used to employ, we didn’t even really understand who they were. I think a lot of us—as an example, a lot of us gathered our translators in Dushanbe, and then went into Afghanistan with them. And these were—these were—you know, basically, reporters aren’t better—any better than their fixers, most of the time, and their translators. And I had one who was—he translated for me from Dari into Russian. And I thought he was quite good. And then, you know, other journalists would brag to me, well, you know, my translator, he was a chemistry professor at Kabul University. And then—you know, but then we all went into Kabul. And as soon as we—when we got there, all sorts of other things started happening. Like, you know, things we had to read. And then everyone discovered that their translators were actually illiterate. (Laughter.) So I don’t—you know, we can talk about the complexities, but I can tell you, we—most of us couldn’t touch them, you know? We were just ill-prepared for deciphering what was going on around us.

PANDITH: I’m going to switch gears a little bit. President Bush talked about the global war on terror. And he also included the concept about the war of ideas, which is, obviously, the ideological component of the war that we were fighting. I’m interested in your thoughts around our use of soft power, our use of understanding how to get into the fight against the ideology that al-Qaida was pushing back on. And I know that you both have very different experiences on the ground, but I know that that was a component of your reporting and your thinking. So, if you would. Perhaps, Alan, we’ll start with you, and then we’ll go to Linda.

CULLISON: Well, the way I think about this is really informed a lot by what I read on these computers and the extent to which I think al-Qaida itself was isolated, even inside Afghan society before the attacks. And that, you know, our concept of al-Qaida was that this—it was this group that was—had this rigid discipline, and very powerful. But in fact it was—you know, a lot of the correspondence—and, basically, I got a forty-gigabyte hard drive. There were hundreds of memos between Kabul and the various cells. And, you know, what a lot of the correspondence read like was, you know, an underfunded NGO where people were really fighting for scraps, you know, in big ways for very small stakes. And they were on the edge of—on the edge—that they saw themselves on the edge of failure. And they really needed a big event to bring in publicity.

And the extent to which we actually allowed ourselves to become—you know, to turn this into a war that was—engaged a lot of the Afghan people, I guess, is probably my biggest regret, because I don’t think that al-Qaida itself really had a lot of traction with a lot of Afghans at the time. The relations with the Taliban were pretty strained. And if anything, quite a few of the actions—I mean—you know, I mean, for instance, the missile strikes on Khost after the attack on the Cole, that solidified the relationship between bin Laden and Mullah Omar. So the great war of ideas, I don’t know that—you know, because a lot of the people I was dealing with were illiterate, I don’t know if they were really privy to the ideas that we were discussing, and they were really even part of the conversation.

PANDITH: Linda.

ROBINSON: I think that—I mean, rhetoric is one thing. And I want to first acknowledge, you and Bruce have great, vast knowledge on these questions you’re asking. So you’re being kind to lob them at us. The basic thing, and I know that, like, Donald Rumsfeld thought we’re just going to go over there. We’re going to kill the bad guys, AQ, separate the wheat from the chaff, and get out. And that was the simple version. But then, you know, people came along with ideas like COIN math. And you can kill people. Their families are bereaved.

PANDITH: Could you tell people what that means?

ROBINSON: Counterinsurgency math. So for every insurgent you kill, you make an enemy out of their family. You create these blood feuds. And you basically manufacture more terrorists. So, then began this idea of, well, what’s the pipeline in? And if they’re radicalized by things other than being killed by U.S. or coalition forces, how do you appeal? How do you understand that radicalization process? Which, of course, you’re one of the premier experts on. And how do you try to deal with them by non-military means?

And then there’s the wider radicalization that’s happening as we christen this whole thing the GWOT, the global war on terrorism. And so we’re talking not just about the difference between al-Qaida and the Taliban, and who’s an affiliate or supporter of those two groups, but all these al-Qaida affiliates spread around the world. We had Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines. So it becomes this industrial-strength counterterrorism effort that becomes—bringing in academics, spawning all kinds of studies, sociological studies. I mean, there was the Af-Pak coordination center at the Pentagon. There was the shura that Dick Holbrooke ran. It was this years-long, multifaceted effort to understand the drivers, and then the methods, that would, through aid and programming of a non-military sort, the information piece to get at this problem that we kept defining up.

PANDITH: Mmm hmm. Couldn’t agree with you more.

HOFFMAN: Were we—I mean, I have to ask, were we successful in that understanding? (Laughter.)

ROBINSON: Well, you know, when you said, we’re going to interpret all of journalism for this panel, I hope no one thinks that we’re—I’m not able to do that. But I did—in addition to writing three books, and then Jim Dobbins—I did a report here about special operations. Dobbins said, why don’t you come to RAND? And where you were. And twenty reports later, that all at RAND, you know, trying to get pieces of this, including one in 2018, what are the lessons of war at a strategic level? We had people around the table like H.R. McMaster, Michelle Flournoy, Elliot Cohen. You know, people trying to understand, what are we doing? Is it working? You know, so there was this constant effort to try to understand, and I think a degree of criticism, the coordination between military and civilian.

You know, I think that that—our tendency as a country is to over-militarize problems, and probably to default to that industrial scale because we have a big giant machine. And this is reflecting my time with the special operations community, and particularly the special forces piece of it, is that small is better. And I actually I wrote—one thing I wrote down to make sure I would quote correctly—(laughs)—if you’ll allow me, I should know it by heart by now but I’ve been working on women in power. “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war and you are there to help them, not to win it for them.” That’s T.E. Lawrence. And that’s really the philosophy the SF goes by, and really the small scale that injects at a local level and trying to get them ready to fight and win their own wars. And I think we, at our peril, ignore that approach.

PANDITH: That’s great.

HOFFMAN: You know, it’s so reminiscent of Vietnam as well, because, of course, in the early years in Vietnam SOF was under the CIA. And then it became—went to MACV, and was under big Army, and became conventional. But the big question we’ve asked everyone the past seven months, that’s elicited lots of interesting responses. So I’m going to put that to both of you. Start with Alan and then come to Linda. If bin Laden were alive today, what would he think? Would he think that 9/11 was this grievous miscalculation? Or would he look at the way the world’s unfolded and the status of the United States in the world today, and think that al-Qaida had actually succeeded?

CULLISON: Well, I think—I think he has—he would have misgivings about how some things unfolded. I think that the initial response in Afghanistan was far larger than he expected. But, no, I’m afraid that, by and large, it was a successful strategy. It was an organization that was on its last legs prior to this. At least, that’s the way they characterized it. You could—you could see that in the correspondence on the hard drives, that they were fighting among themselves. And then gradually, I think it was in 2000 or early 2001, you started seeing reference to something called “the big job.” The big job was going to bring them all together and, you know, help bring them some advertising.

I think that—yeah, there’s—in particular there was a letter from bin Laden to Mullah Omar after the U.S. started bombing basically saying, you know, yeah, this looks bad right now. They’re hitting us hard. But just keep—you know, keep in mind the long-term strategy here. You know, we’re going to—they’re going to come into Afghanistan. And they’re going to have a protracted war. And at some point, they’re going to have to withdraw. And they’ll be like the Soviet Union. It’ll be collapse and bankruptcy. I don’t think that, you know, it really worked out that well for him in Afghanistan, at least while he was alive. But, you know, I believe that whatever he was dissatisfied with in Iraq, that it was actually a prize for him. I mean, I think overreaction is something that everyone here has discussed. And, you know, the effect that it’s had on our government is something we’ve gone over a lot.

I mean, I personally, as a journalist, am also concerned about what it did to journalism, and what it did to us as a society. I mean, to go back to what we used to be, I mean, we used to cover conflicts on the ground. I mean, when I was in Afghanistan I covered an area on foot in the car from Badakhshan down to the red deserts in the south. And gradually, the terrorists changed that themselves, by killing journalists. I mean, they killed my colleague Danny Pearl when I was working with him. And everything gradually became more inaccessible. There were a lot of humanitarian reasons that journalists started distancing themselves from the subjects. You know, they started doing hostile environment courses. They put on body armor. They embedded. And this was safe and this was great. This was more humane. Fewer of us got killed. But we also became more distant from everything. And everything became more formalized.

And so I think that that was—that’s also a—I don’t know if—it’s not, to my mind, something that specifically al-Qaida wrote about, this is what we’re going to do to journalists. But I think that we followed our own role, our own part of his script for Western society. And I and I think it’s—I think it’s been quite damaging.

PANDITH: Yeah. That’s really powerful.

HOFFMAN: Linda.

ROBINSON: I do think that many groups learned from al-Qaida. And I think we haven’t brought up Iraq. I know we’ve got a half-hour with all the experts in the room to talk about, but that, you know, development of an industrial-scale landholding caliphate, called the Islamic State, was—did benefit, I think, from some of their tactics. And more broadly, what we—I think the U.S. has a very hard time with, as I alluded before, but it’s understanding how adversaries fight and win. And it’s often—it’s not it’s not brute force. It’s not sheer military power. It’s all the other elements of power. And that is something that we see today with Iran, and how it’s getting a leg up on the current conflict.

And I think this is very important for us, you know, to try to understand what we’re missing. And that is not to say we didn’t spend years on this. And I’ve spilled a good bit of ink on this too. And it’s gone by different names—hybrid warfare, regular warfare, political warfare was George Kennan’s term. You know, it’s been around, but I think we haven’t taken it seriously enough to understand how you can use—and it’s not just new military technologies, but it’s new ways of employing, exploiting vulnerabilities, and using unconventional means to gain advantage. And you exhaust a population, where we really tired of forever wars, the amount of money, the amount of losses. And we didn’t really get the victories I think that we sought. So that means the other side got more.

HOFFMAN: You know, you both mentioned Iraq, so let me ask specifically. I mean, did that doom us? Did that doom the war on terror? I mean, was that the undoing? Or, as you’re suggesting, Linda, it was a lot more complex, that we just didn’t have an overall understanding of this particular form of conflict?

ROBINSON: We certainly went there under false pretenses. I mean, there’s no question about that. And it was, in terms of a shift in manpower, attention, and resources, absolutely. And then we embarked on a new puzzle, trying to understand Iraq and trying to understand what it would take to put Humpty Dumpty back together. And Colin Powell, you know, had it right—you break it, you own it. And that’s the one thing about the military. If you give the military a mission, they’re going to keep trying to solve it. And it’s up to the civilians to say, no, we’re done. Or say, we’re not going to even go down that route to begin with.

I think in this case though it’s hard to say ISIS would never have come about. It’s hard to say these other groups that became part of this global network, with some tenuous connections. I mean, I really think this, where I would say academia kind of bought into the GWOT, rather than being more critical about do we really need to be out there with Abu Sayyaf? Although, again, there was a very targeted approach to that, that led to an accord in Mindanao, lead to some good things. So, again, I think being modest and humble about what can be achieved. In a case like Afghanistan, societies change at the pace of generations. And we just have to get that through our heads.

PANDITH: Did you say humble? (Laughter.) Sorry, did you use that word?

ROBINSON: I know, American and humble is a contradiction, isn’t it?

PANDITH: Yeah.

HOFFMAN: Alan.

CULLISON: What, whether Iraq was—I mean, what’s the concrete—the ask here, is whether Iraq was helpful or? I mean, I—

HOFFMAN: Did that ruin the war? Could we have achieved more limited objectives if we had just focused on Afghanistan?

HOFFMAN: I think probably the least-productive outcome for al-Qaida, after September 11, what they probably would have feared most was to have their leaders quietly assassinated, you know, without a lot of noise. I mean, it’s not like I would favor that kind of solution, myself. I mean, I’m, frankly, nostalgic for the days when they used to arrest people and put them on trial. And I think that after the African embassy bombings, there were—there were a lot of, you know, positive things about that. You know, you got to learn quite a bit about the terrorist groups that were operating against us. And there wasn’t the similar education of American society after 9/11, I think, because of that.

I mean, we instead got a lot of kind of techno-erotic description of how we were killing people. And I think it’s sort of—it was sort of good—I mean, a lot of it was very good journalism. I don’t want to—I don’t want to diss that. There has been a lot of good journalism, including from, you know, embeds in the military and from the military. But there is another side of it that I tend to bemoan. And I think that, yeah, that from al-Qaida’s perspective, no, I think that Iraq was a gift.

PANDITH: I think we should move into the question in the audience. It is on the record. And I know you heard that. I also want to acknowledge the fact that we have people who are virtually attending as well. So if you have a question, please know that you can ask it virtually. But please do raise your hand. I’ll begin on this side of the room. Introduce yourself. And we’ll go back and forth between real world and virtual world.

Christina, please.

Q: Hello. It’s good to see you. I’m Christina Bouri. I’m the new Middle East fellow at the Office of Government Relations at the Episcopal Church.

So I have two questions, pretty quick, but not long to answer, hopefully. So how much better have we gotten at understanding the local culture that you discussed, when it’s so heavily influenced, or has been, by U.S. soft power over the years? The soft power of the U.S. and the presence of the U.S. militarily, and otherwise, has evolved, has changed. So I wonder, even when you have leaders, like the king of Jordan, who struggle navigating their own tribal systems, and even in the UAE, how do we even come in and do that, when their own leaders have struggled with that for years?

My other question is on the integrity of journalism, specifically local journalists in—over wars for many, many years in the Middle East. There’s been attacks on journalists for many, many years, and I think more recently with the conflicts. So, you know, they’re a very important source of on the ground information. So how do we work to rebuild that after a lot of destruction, because it does affect how we get information as well? Thank you.

PANDITH: Thank you. Do you want to go first?

ROBINSON: I’ll try to be brief. Christina, it’s good to see you.

I think that there are—I’m a fan of books because they’re there, they’re on the shelf, you can look at them. A lot of books have been written. There’s a lot of scholarship. And the military did internalize in a lot of doctrine, joint concepts. There’s a body of work that tried to capture the understanding that was painfully gained, imperfect and incomplete as it is. But my concern now is that’s just all seen as a waste of time, and they’re going back to a very minimalist view of simply—and taking, perhaps, some of the wrong lessons from decapitation ops, the network ops of terrorism. To just say, we’re going to go after drug traffickers in the same way. So I think we’ve actually spawned a new problem by profligate use of the hunter-killer teams and direct action special operations.

I don’t—you know, I would leave maybe to Alan, if he wants to take on the question about protection of local journalists. But we do know record numbers of journalists are being killed. We’re also having trouble covering—the journalists, the working current working journalists, having trouble covering events. And I think that’s an alarming development.

CULLISON: Yeah. I mean, I don’t—as for solutions, no, I don’t have any. I mean, I think that this—attacks on journalists, I really do—I do think that it’s something we have to be cognizant, that it is sometimes part of provoking us is to play the script that they want us to play. I mean, that—I think that news organizations have, unfortunately, solved this problem simply by closing bureaus and covering these places less. And they will tell you it’s for economic reasons, but I don’t—I don’t really buy that. I mean, yeah, you can—you can say it’s for economic reasons. It’s, of course, cheaper to not cover wars, and talk to commanders instead, and, you know, talk to high-level officials. Sort of in the same—for the same reason it’s cheaper for newspapers in in previous years to cover crime in underwear rather than deep analysis of what’s going on in the United States.

And, you know, what you’re bringing up here is not—it’s not just a question of how we cover other countries, but it’s also about how we cover ourselves. You know, I really don’t think that, you know, our coverage of ourselves is up to the same standards that it was before. And, you know, this—you know, I think, you know, the militarization of America, the military industrial complex—it annoys me whenever I go back to my hometown in Iowa, and the local deputies are strapped and booted and look like they’re about to invade Poland. I just don’t—I don’t— think a lot of this stuff really needs to be covered. And it’s important, for all the reasons that, you know, we talk about when we’re talking about the reaction of governments to terror.

PANDITH: We have a question online, and then we’ll go to—thank you. Do you want to read it out?

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Brian Mongeau.

Q: Hi. Thanks very much for your time today. Brian Mongeau, CFO at the defense tech firm Cav. And, maybe pertinent to this conversation, was an enlisted Green Beret who actually was in southern Afghanistan in 2017.

And my question actually has to do with journalism at that time, and how Afghanistan was covered—or, maybe more to the point, not covered. Some would argue, you know, I think it’s been hit on today, that the lack of coverage maybe allowed us to operate a little bit more in the shadows. Maybe there’s something good to that. The flipside argument would be it allowed a stasis to occur where nobody in Washington actually seemed interested in solving the problem at that point. So would just be interested how you think about journalism and those sort of data war timeframes, and how conflict should or shouldn’t be covered in terms of what that means for tradeoffs both for journalists and national security as a whole. Whether that helps promote decision-making or whether it actually allows a stasis to nowhere.

PANDITH: Great question. Thank you. Who wants to begin?

CULLISON: I’ll take it first, if you want. I mean, I think I’ve—you can probably guess where I’m coming from. I think it does make us safer to have information coming from the ground. I mean, I had mentioned that early in the war I was able to cover the country from Badakhshan and the red deserts. But, you know, as things got more dangerous and more formalized in Afghanistan, I saw that world shrink down to where you could only travel to the north. Pretty soon you couldn’t travel anywhere except Kabul and/or maybe by helicopter. And then by the end, I mean, I was there when Kabul fell. It was basically a safe room in a guarded house behind some HESCO barriers. And to really proffer anything of much use to society is pretty difficult under those circumstances.

And, you know, what happens when—what happens when you don’t offer this type of reporting, I would say, you know, from the ground, is that it’s replaced by something else. And it’s replaced by essentially access journalism. And I was an access journalist too. I mean, I’m not knocking it. I mean, you do what you can, you know, based in Washington. But, you know, you become soon a purveyor of what we are trying to do and our strategies. And basically we’re narrating ourselves. And, you know, that—you know, because I’m covered—I was based in Russia on and off for about twenty years. I mean, I have seen a society which does—you know, was insular, and writing about itself. And gradually it buys its own baloney. It starts to believe that it can invade a neighboring country very easily, and it’s just going to be a special operation. It’ll all be over. And soon you have a greatest war in Europe. I think we’re exposed to all sorts of dangers by this. And I would consider it a national security issue, myself. But, you know, I’m a journalist, so.

PANDITH: Linda.

ROBINSON: I think it’s a national security risk, but it’s also a risk to democracy. Because if you don’t have informed citizens, how are they going to decide what to vote and what policies to support? And I think that it is—I think there is a crisis of journalism. But I would agree with Alan, it does—for print journalists, it doesn’t take very much to support us to get out there. And my beat for Latin America was all over the region. I did have some stringers to help cover crisis spots, but I traveled constantly. I was out there. I was on my own. I went down to the FARC camps on my own. I had certain safety measures I would use to let—you know, it was basically an info op. I got the president’s office to send a letter saying, we expect her to come back out. (Laughs.) You know, this kind of thing. This is the Colombian president. I didn’t involve the U.S. government in any of that.

But I think that it’s important that journalists still strive to do real journalism, which has to happen in the country, period. You have to try to understand the country. You have to talk to the people, 360, not just the high-level people. When my first story was about Nicaragua and why the Sandinistas were voted out. And I traveled from end to end of the country. And I heard what people were saying. And as long—and the Carter Center was down there watching the vote. And it was a fair vote. And they got booted out. So we don’t understand—but no one—I was one of two reporters reporting that. So you’ve got to do the shoe leather. But the problem is, journalism here has transformed. And it’s not being funded. So the news collection is not happening. And we are blind. And it’s a danger.

PANDITH: Really.

CULLISON: Actually, there’s something I kind of want to add to that. And having not worked in government, I can’t really attest to whether my suspicions are true. But, you know, having worked in Moscow, I was sometimes surprised at how little the U.S. embassy knew about what was going on in Russia. Partly because I think the staff was limited as to where it was—you know, where it could go. I didn’t really deal with the U.S. embassy after a while, because they were just not useful as an information source. And in Kabul, I don’t—they seemed weirdly not in touch with the fact that the country was about to fall apart. I mean, I would contact them and was—but this this might have just been sort of a dysfunction with some of the people I was dealing with. But, you know, they were inviting me to, you know, embassy receptions that were going to happen in the fall, which, of course, you know, Kabul fell before then. And I went there because one of my colleagues said, you’ve got to come here quickly, you know, the country’s melting like butter.

And I do think that local journalism—you know, journalism on the ground is actually—has been informative to our embassies and to our government in the past. And I do think that it filled a role that people don’t really even talk about on that level. Partly because I think the national security state likes to, you know, identify itself as doing a lot of efficient work and getting all the—you know, all the best information before journalists do. And in fact, we’re in the same business. And I do think that we have been very good at it in the past, and have been—I don’t want to say an ally, because that’s not what we’re supposed to be, but I think we’ve been extremely useful.

PANDITH: We had a question here. Hi.

Q: Thank you. My name is James Siebens. I’m a fellow with the Stimson Center.

So my question has to do with exactly this area, where the government may, at times, impede on the work of journalists. And so I wanted to ask for your reflections about maybe differences or continuity with the treatment of journalists like James Reisen during the global war on terror, and the way that we see now the team from the New York Times, for example, being threatened with indictments, and that sort of thing. Have we seen significant differences in the way that the government has approached the challenge of restricting public access to information by putting pressure on journalists over time in these last few decades, as a consequence or as informed by the experiences of the global war on terror?

CULLISON: Well, when it comes to covering this administration, I’ve got precious little experience. Partly because the experience was so hostile when I was dealing with them. I mean, I was covering the State Department when they appointed a new spokesperson who used to—you know, we used to have briefings maybe twice a week where we would have conversations. And then, I don’t know, they appointed someone who was just outright hostile most of the time, and there really wasn’t much point in having a conversation. Gradually all the journalists just sort of dispersed. At least that was my experience. Maybe they found other inroads.

I don’t know if that—I don’t want to attribute too much of what’s going on to the adverse effects of the great war on terror, that the dysfunctions and the hostility is due to that relationship. I don’t know. I mean, I do have complaints about the general movement of things, but whether that’s to blame for what’s happening now I couldn’t say.

PANDITH: Linda, did you want to comment on—

ROBINSON: Just briefly. I mean, we were contrasting kind of the old days and now. And it certainly, in my experience, the best ambassadors would routinely invite the journalist in, you know, for an exchange. It wouldn’t be just one-way briefing. They were getting as much out of it as we were getting. And it was, I think, just this general idea that there was an attempt, with different missions—(laughs)—to inform the public, to inform government policy. They were all trying to understand the place we’re in and the problem that—whatever is being considered important to U.S. readership, U.S. government.

And that’s really gone. The level of hostility, and worse. So you mentioned some of the egregious examples in the suits and the expulsion of the press, the professional press, real journalists from the Pentagon. And we don’t know what’s going on. You get more information out of AIS watching ship—you know, all the remote means that we have to report on things than you’re getting. We have soldiers dying and no one knows about it, and no information on the bases being damaged. And we have Congress not doing its job in demanding that information, which should be part of this whole circle of excavating what’s going on to inform the American public. So I could not be more critical about the attacks on the U.S. press. And it is damaging our democracy.

PANDITH: We have a question online. Just give us a second.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Raffi Gregorian.

Q: Hello. Thank you very much. I’m Raffi Gregorian, former State Department, former NATO, former U.N. CT official.

I also have two brothers who are journalists. And I’m really curious to know the degree to which the transformation of journalism through social media affected how you covered the war on terrorism? Because they kind of track nicely over the course of twenty years, the transformation of journalism by social media but also the war on terrorism. Thanks.

PANDITH: It’s a great question. Thank you. Either one of you want to jump in?

CULLISON: Well, I think social media has, of course, transformed terror in interesting ways. I mean, I think that it has been impressive, or it was impressive, how they sufficiently broke up cells so that it really wasn’t possible for terror groups to do any serious, complex operations, because they couldn’t sustain cells. And, of course, social media made it possible to do a lot of lone wolf recruitment. But I would say social media—I mean, it has kind of reinforced some of the tendencies that I’m complaining about and that I repeatedly bring up when—even when people don’t ask them, about kind of the laziness of corporations and not deploying journalists in certain places, that they feel like they can do it remotely. But I think that the social media has been—the social media question, for me, has been more interesting, at least from on the terror side, and what it means for the groups themselves and their ability to recruit.

PANDITH: Linda.

ROBINSON: I have to confess, I am really very little on social media. I know it’s impactful. And someone other than me can really, I think, expound on its impact on journalism. But I think, other than a source, a ready way to access information sources that I believe to be well-grounded for various means. I mean, I think this is where it has to be. Each person has to consume their media in a responsible way and rely on sources and know what’s opinion, what’s fact, what’s absolute, you know, bunk. And the problem is it’s getting all mixed up. And it’s very hard. It’s contaminating the real information environment. And that may make me a curmudgeon. And I’m fine to own that. But I think that it’s safest if everyone takes responsibility for seeking out reliable sources.

But it’s another thing that I think is undercutting attempts by journalists to do their job. Everybody, and daily reporters, people that are working media have to be out there. I mean, we all use it to try to promote our work, but I think it’s a dangerous place these days, especially when—and it’s not about content moderation, another thing I have a lot of views on. It’s really about product safety, and what kind of platforms are out there with the right standards.

PANDITH: We’re going to take one more from the room, and then we’re going to close it down. Please introduce yourself.

Q: Many thanks to all four of you. I’m Jordan McGillis with the Economic Innovation Group. I’m also a Novak journalism fellow at The Fund for American Studies.

Alan, when you were embedded with the Northern Alliance, how did you stay in touch with your editors and file stories?

CULLISON: I had what was—would be considered now to be a very primitive sat phone that you unfurled. And there were two satellites, one over the Indian Ocean and then one over, I think, North-Central Asia. And you—I would—I was living in a mud hut. I’m tempted to go into the details of the mud hut, but I won’t. But the—but, yeah, you would have to direct it—direct it over the South Asian satellite and wait for a tone. And once the tone was right, then you had enough juice for a transmission. So I was kind of blissfully disconnected from a lot of editors. I could always—if I didn’t want to talk to them, I could just say that the sat phone wasn’t working. (Laughter.) But I was usually able to get one transmission or one phone call in a night. And for that reason—I mean, it wasn’t enough to hook up a computer and actually transmit. So I was writing things out by hand and then dictating over the phone. And that was—but that was the way most—

PANDITH: What year was that?

CULLISON: That was ’01—in the autumn of ’01. And there were—

Q: Just like—(off mic)—on the other side listening to you as you did—(off mic)?

CULLISON: Yes, that was—that was another refreshing thing. Yeah, that was—that was in the village of Jabal Saraj, in the Panjshir Valley. There was a one group that did have infrastructure with CNN. And I think maybe there were twenty, thirty journalists there. And the Afghans had this notion that CNN actually ran the United States. (Laughter.) And every day before you went out on a mission to sort of look at the lines, you would have to go to a house near CNN, or there was a representative of the Mujahideen there, and you would get a handwritten piece of paper that said, yes, this journalist can walk—you know, drive around these areas. And our fixers were under the impression that we went to CNN to get permission for what we were doing. So.

HOFFMAN: OK, we got two minutes left, so let me pitch you the biggest softball question imaginable. Are we safer today than we were on September 10, 2001? Linda and then Alan.

ROBINSON: The threats are of a different nature, to be sure. And I think that we are less safe today because we are more divided and less equipped with good information.

CULLISON: Yeah, I’d agree. And, I mean, the question is, safer from what? We’re definitely safer from complex terror attacks. They’ve broken up—you know, our forces have broken up their ability to do anything like 9/11. But the question is, at what cost and, you know, what we’ve—what we’ve sacrificed in order to do it. And I’m—and it might sound a little strange, and I’d want to hedge it, but, you know, even our habit nowadays of when people part and say goodbye to each other, they often say “stay safe.” And I don’t know where that came from, but I think this—you know, this interest in safety a lot has—it is possible to overemphasize it. And I’ve got regrets about it, for all the reasons I’ve repeated several times.

PANDITH: We are really grateful to both of you for your insights and your perspective. And so, first, before you go away, let’s first thank our guests for taking part. (Applause.) In addition, I’d like to thank the CFR team, who did a lot of work to put this together. So thank you to everyone. And, Bruce, you get the last word.

HOFFMAN: Yes. Our next event will be an evening event on Monday, August 17, here, where we will be featuring Michael Morell, former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Gina Bennett, longtime senior analytical service member of the CIA—the person who in 1993 first identified bin Laden as a, quote/unquote, “person of interest” to our national security. So we hope to see you then.

PANDITH: Thank you, all. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.