25 years after 9/11 | feat. Bruce Hoffman

0:00Good morning. It's Friday, September 11th for Multifront War in the Middle East is now 1,070 days old and it's been exactly 25 years since the deadliest attack on American soil and a attack that launched the war on terror certainly forged my career and in many ways continues to shape our world. I'm your host Jonathan Schanzer welcome back to a personally meaningful episode of the FD Morning Brief. The 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks is our theme today and while we'll be assessing where things stand in the subsequent war on terror in just a few minutes, I want to pause for a moment and acknowledge the war fighters, the intelligence analysts, the homeland security officials, the policemen, the firefighters and even the citizen activists who helped America bounce back from that horrible day. We owe them all our sincere thanks but not just for their bravery and

1:04resilience on September 11th and the days that followed. We owe them thanks for helping to ensure that another major attack has not occurred again on American soil since that faithful day. Of course there are no guarantees against another attack on the homeland but 25 years of keeping us safe is no small achievement. Let's not take that for granted. A major setback for the Lebanese his Bali yesterday after discovering a massive underground military complex in the Ali Tahir Ridge near the town of Navatia and southern Lebanon, the IDF has now blown it up. First the explosion itself is worth documenting the Israeli's place more than 1,100 pounds of explosives in the underground complex and the US Geological Survey recorded a manmade earthquake that registered 4.1 on the Richter scale. Big booms aside the explosion of this complex was a gut shot to what was once Iran's most powerful proxy. It was apparently a 20 year project with Iran costing untold millions

2:07of dollars. Today it lies in subterranean rubble. The underground infrastructure was designed to be a staging ground for a hisbalah invasion of northern Israel that obviously never occurred. Why his balah decided not to join Hamas's war on October 7th and invade Israel with the army and infrastructure that it had? Well that's a question for the history books. For now suffice it to say that his balah is down to roughly 20% of its previous power and is in no place to initiate the vast majority of its plans to destroy the so-called Zionist entity. I tend to think that's a good thing but don't count his balah out folks. The group is still trying to find its footing which is why the political process with the government of Lebanon is so crucial. Somehow some way the Lebanese armed forces need to regain a monopoly of force in the land of the Seeders. Now for your headlines headline one the Houthis those pesky goat herders seized the Yemeni port of Mocha yesterday. Days after launching a

3:07combined ballistic missile and drone attack in Saudi Arabia the Houthis are moving aggressively in multiple directions right now and I don't like what I see they are threatening the world's most important oil producer. They are consolidating power in the war to control all of Yemen and they are rapidly expanding their control over the Babu Mandab straight which is a key transit point for energy and goodship the other Red Sea. As I see it the Houthis advance might just be the first test for the nascent Mecca alliance that brought together Saudi Arabia Pakistan Turkey and maybe even Egypt. But get this Pakistan said yesterday that it has no plans to come to Saudi Arabia's aid. So yes the so-called Mecca Joint Defense Pack is worrisome on some level but it also could turn out to be a whole lot of hot air from the Saudi side of the street. headline two president Trump warned that the US could strike pickaxe mountain the deeply buried hard to reach nuclear facility in central Iran near Natanz according to satellite imagery there's been a flurry of construction activity

4:07at the site over the last year and that activity hasn't gone unnoticed by US intelligence agencies that's why Donald Trump is warned to Iran not to and I quote get cute or else that said I got a wonder what could we possibly do to the regime at this point that we haven't already I don't know maybe we'll find out. headline three Algeria severed diplomatic ties with the UAE citing quote provocative or hostile and quote actions Algeria didn't offer many specifics but relations between the two countries have been contentious for years over disagreements on things like normalization with Israel and Moroccan territorial claims to the western Sahara. last year Algeria's president went so far as to accuse the UAE of trying to destabilize his country the upshot air-bunity continues to fracture extremist regimes like the one in Algiers deciding with some of the nastier some estates while the UAE continues to seek out pragmatic partners in the Middle East and beyond one of these past as a future in the region let's hope it's the right one headline four Iran's besieged forces reportedly tightening its grip over the

5:13country under the direction of its returning commander Hossein Taib Iranian opposition source to say the Taib is overhauling the besiege rooting out opponents of the regime and building out a network of informants who can inform the besiege brewing protest movements the force is surging its presence in Iran's markets gas station schools and hospitals and it's expanding its intelligence gathering efforts we obviously don't know when the next uprising will begin in Iran the last one back in January was met with utter brutality one can only hope that the United States has a plan for the next one maybe a little close air support is needed the people of Iran need to know that they can stand up to their regime with maximum support from Uncle Sam can't say that enough on this program that's the mantra here at FTD expected to come in episode the head all right it's time for my interview with Bruce Hoffman of the council on foreign relations Bruce has been studying terrorism for nearly five decades i remember reading some of his prescient work as a graduate student Jerusalem back in the late 1990s but it was the September 11th

6:17attacks that undeniably put Bruce's work front and center for me and i think for much of the country Bruce and i sat down recently to make sense of the last 25 years the central question we all have to grapple with has the threat we face back then dissipated or is it alive and as threatening as ever let's find out welcome to the FTD morning brief Bruce Hoffman thanks very much for having me Jonathan great to have you with us couldn't they give a better guy for our 9-11 episode we're obviously we're 25 years since 9-11 which is really hard for me to imagine already get my head wrapped around given that that was one of the moments that actually launched by career i know it's played an important role in yours although i think if i'm not mistaken you've been doing this for almost five decades 50 years this semester that is unbelievable and say you you bring a wealth of knowledge to this space and obviously the fact that you're

7:20looking at this before 9-11 i think gives you even more street cred but let's talk about this 25th anniversary i mean what what what do we take away from this milestone what are the lessons learned what are the lessons maybe that we have yet to learn thinking back to the immediate aftermath within months after the 9-11 attacks firstly i think everyone expected there would be another attacker another wave of attacks and they didn't materialize we know well god it was planning them college in mahamid the architect of 9-11 had a plot to crash an airplane in a similar way into an iconic skyscraper in Los Angeles it was of course the shoe bomber incidents that that fortuitously didn't amount to anything so i think everyone expected in the aftermath of 9-11 when's the next attack and it's really a towering achievement that we've gone a quarter of a century without any major or significant terrorist attack occurring in the united states and with

8:24only one attack the 2019 shooting at naval air station Pensacola where three sailors and eight others were tragically wounded is the only evidence of a successful foreign directed plotted planned terrorist attack materializing so that's all entirely positive the homeland has been kept safe at the same time it's also a bit of a melancholy anniversary i think because the other expectation i think certainly i had but everyone probably back then had is that the threat from al-Qaeda and from salafi jihad ii terrorism would be eliminated after all president bush declared not only a war on terror but a war on terror you know war against all terrorist groups with global reach and the fact that al-Qaeda is back in afghanistan the Taliban is back in power in afghanistan according to the latest united nations monitoring report al-Qaeda has facilities in a third of afghans 34 provinces it just re recently re-open the tarnac farm which was its infamous training camp outside of

9:29of kandahar al-Qaeda has franchises in at least two dozen countries from north african to southeous stasia isis has 20 so clearly we kept the homeland safe but we were not very effective encountering the ideology the motivation that still draws both donors and recruits into these organizations you know it's funny you're talking about the the record that we have i'm not getting hit at home i mean i have to say we got lucky a bunch didn't we i mean this was not necessarily about the skill of the cia or dhs or the fbi i mean i think about that time square bombing that almost happened that was we dodged you know we dodged a big one right there i mean i you know we always i guess we say in hockey you know when you're a goalie sometimes it's better to be lucky than good i think we we were a bit of both here um we've got to be good to be lucky that's right that's right but i mean i do you do you think that the um that the threat stream i haven't been

10:34in government for a long time i haven't looked at anything you know classified you think the threat stream is as significant today as it was back then i mean i remember back then it was like threats every day you know we're popping up on the radar do you think we're still at a place now where it's a constant that the systems blink and red every day or do you think that the overall threat of geodesm is diminished even if it's not gone well i i'm not i'm not in i'm in government years either and have it at access to classified material so it's only what i read um in the you know open sources but i don't think we're at the same threat level and this is where we have succeeded beyond any doubt we've degraded and diminished al-Qaeda and ISIS's capabilities um so that no there's not the same level but what worries me is i do detect uh a hammering of expertise and of skill sets from the government that um you know it's been set in motion for for some years now

11:37i think it's problematical that for instance we don't have the same on the ground granularity of intelligence we had for instance in Afghanistan so to a certain extent we don't have the ability or we really know what al-Qaeda's up to in Afghanistan today um and i think there's a certain complacency that is a problem that we've been so successful in projecting the on-lead or go the threat has not not receded but has disappeared i would argue the threats become much more complex and therefore tempting to terrorists like al-Qaeda and ISIS in other words 25 years ago we just had to worry about al-Qaeda and just focus our attention al-Qaeda well it's all today it's al-Qaeda and ISIS as it is being for over a decade it's the Iranian threat network as well it's domestic terrorists both far left far right and others national nihilistic violent extremists we have categories that didn't even exist then and what worries we have to cover are a very diverse waterfront of threats that could once again emboldened al-Qaeda or ISIS to think

12:43they could exploit our distraction for example with a successful attack i fully agree that that threat matrix looks pretty wild but i also do get the sense that you know the system's not blank and red every day and that is kind of an interesting combo that on the one hand it's elevated on the other hand well what do we have to worry about and that probably doesn't sound like a great preamble for whatever story comes next but let's let's just go through some of the the groups that we were battling back then and just kind of understand where we are now i mean you have the elimination of of Osama bin Laden in was ira stan and that's followed by the elimination of i'm an al-Zawar i who was you know a the guy that came right after uh Osama bin Laden the less charismatic more boring not a scary sounding or looking but as diabolical do they have leadership now that we need to be

13:43concerned about now that we've gone through kind of the two top guys were we're kind of into not to borrow from obama but we're kind of dealing with the jv squad now and do we call it that in terms of al-Qaeda or is it just as dangerous as it was before with the core id alarms running the running to the show i think it's just as dangerous for two reasons firstly during the talabons reconquest of afghanistan they freed at least three dozen senior al-Qaeda leaders who are in prisons at either borgraw mara base or the bokichari prison in Kabul so they're back out there um some of al-Qaeda's closest allies uh syra shakani is minister of the interior in afghanistan controlling the police forces the security service the border um director of intelligence in afghanistan and the talabon government is a close ally of al-Qaeda so there

14:44is still some leading figures out there in the al-Qaeda firm and that i would certainly classify bad guys for me the biggest concern at this moment which i think you'll appreciate giving your expertise in iran is that at least a titular leader or titular amir of al-Qaeda safe al-Adol is in iran and in fact when we look back on the the immediate aftermath of nine eleven we tend to focus on pakistan is the place that al-Qaeda went to ground and was their safe haven iran was just as important and see your al-Qaeda figures fled to iran and that was in the nine eleven commission report i mean we read all about this that actually you had hijackers that flew through iran um there were treasury designations that came out long after the fact shelling that they were senior al-Qaeda leaders that were uh hold up in iran raising money in iran maybe making plans for future attacks in iran this whole she-eyed sonny firewall thing was never it was never realistic

15:46exactly and that's why i think it's enormously worrisome that the person who hasn't been officially appointed in the year but resides in iran at this particular juncture in history yeah given the sharpened frictions which is an understatement between the united states in iran having an al-Qaeda leader in your pocket i think that's that's enormously alarming and also safe all auto is a warrior uh gain a lot and you know an actual degrees in economics and public administration al-Zawahari assertion he served in special operations in iran egypt and was present at every hijunker in al-Qaeda's history as a fighter or a trainer so he has tremendous institutional knowledge and expertise that he brings to his leadership role that's an interesting and it's an interesting point um does make you wonder why you know the u.s. propping a lot of precise munitions all over iran how come they haven't figured out the precise location of one ciphal auto and taking care of that but that's i don't know maybe that's a conversation for

16:48that cia or sub-assgt gorka or whoever um okay so all right that's the state of al-Qaeda still dangerous leadership in iran um you know and probably has a lot less pressure on it from the u.s. military and i'm getting stopped as much so that gives them more room to breathe and that was always the george w.bush and and um and dick janey approach which is squeeze them as hard as you can make it so that they have no room to operate and um you know and and that's how you cut down on terrorist attacks when you start to loosen up a little bit and you're not squeezing them as hard i'm guessing it gives them more room to operate more freedom of action so okay that's the al-Qaeda side of things and we got the taliban um and we just marked the anniversary recently of the abingate disaster which was kind of the moment that precipitated the rise re-rise to power of uh of the taliban um what's so interesting is they've been quiet right we don't actually see them engaging in a lot of um sort of horrible things the way that we might have in the past they were of

17:53course the people that um gave al-Qaeda its safe haven but they also were part of you know um the training uh training camps and the like we're not seeing as much of that um so what do we make of the taliban are they a threat are they brought to heal right now after this weird you know interregnum of american presence there what what's your what's your sense of of how much we should be staying up at night worried about the taliban well taliban you know unlike al-Qaeda or ISIS was never designated as a foreign terrorist organization uh so it was always a different kind of uh kind of entity i think right now uh two things they're focused on a strictly local and regional agenda in part undermining pakistan uh using the uh the taliban version of the pakistan version rather the taliban the ttp um backing it to an extent that i think is left pakistan

18:55seriously discomforted possibly backing beluchi groups as well which i'll also include you're on in that category um so behind the scenes the taliban is not just focused internally um but it's it's it's a regional focus i would say in terms of of afghanistan they're particularly i mean they're trying to put the best face possible to get international aid into obtain recognition that will enable them to survive in power into govern so for the moment they're playing nice but you know it's it's like disha vool over again it's very much like the 1990s when we believe them that they would keep al-Qaeda in check and that their hosting of osama b-laden had no consequences beyond the borders of afghanistan and that obviously was a uh a highly misplaced assumption to put it mildly yeah although i think back then you know the some of the like that the the i mean they were

19:56destroying statues right where you know i mean they were stoning people out in the public square you get a sense that they dial back on some of that knowing that all it would do is attract more westward attention and possible more trouble do you do get a sense maybe i'm going to put a i'm going to put the positive spin on this that despite the fact that we lost a huge amount of blood and treasure in afghanistan that maybe the taliban are chasing somewhat maybe um and they don't want to invite more intervention again that would be the positive spin the negative of course being as they're right back to exactly where they were and um all we did was lose a lot of blood and treasure um okay um that you mentioned ISIS before and i mentioned the jb squad that was of course the famous gaff from uh from president obama they emerged as something quite a bit more threatening than a jb squad at the end of the day beheading americans conquering large swaths of uh sirian orak they're no longer there i mean the caliphates gone um at least as as as as it once existed but i

21:01guess the concern now is there's still islamic state impact of stan but there's also islamic state in africa right this is like their primary playground tell us about what's going on there because we never really fought the war on terror in africa in any serious way um is this going to be the next battleground? Certainly it's been first-hand ground for expansion and in fact the abatabad documents that were seized from the in law and go back to 2004 identified Nigeria as precisely an area where al-Qaeda could profitably expand which they did boko haram was a product of that that's that group is since allied itself with with ISIS um both groups i would say a particularly active in africa with j and i am an al-Qaeda ally hoist to conquer or at least um as besieged bomacode the capital of of of mali i mean you have thousands and minimum thousands of deaths there

22:06that we just don't really pay attention to within the context of local conflicts and particularly um uh you know particularly unstable area what worries me is two things one is that ISIS is followed al-Qaeda strategy because of the weakness of the core they've devolved a lot of autonomy and authority to their branches that are able to uh the affiliate group phenomenon the the planning of nationalism and global jihadism to create this sort of powerful cocktail right? precisely and and look at the record of of ISIS-K the the ISIS affiliate in horeson the ancient name for afghanistan pakistan and and central asia in 2024 they carried out very serious international terrorist attacks seemingly from nowhere we thought they were also a local phenomenon that was just in their box they carried out a dual suicide bombing in karmane rock uh de r-aeron rather um during the

23:12the memorial ceremony for uh kassem sullani uh you would think that that would be a very secure environment iran after all is a police state isis k was able to penetrate iranian defenses and then two months later they carried out a terrible massacre at the crocus musical in masqa where gunmen killed 130 persons and then on new year's day 2025 less than a year later they were able to um radicalize uh military veteran from texas that was uh uh convert to islam who carried out the um the vehicular attack uh in the french horde of of noralans similarly same with al-qaeda and al-shabab for instance we tend to look at al-shabab in samalia is again a local phenomena um twice in the past eight years a members of al-shabab which is probably the least technologically proficient um franchise of al-qaeda have been arrested undertaking the same type of pilot training that the 9-11 hijackers under so

24:16that's crazy groups are thinking big and think we'll be on their locus of conflict to strike elsewhere oh absolutely and by the way i mean if you've been reading the the news lately out of the Arab world actually looks like al-shabab again you know kind of low-tech kind of rag tag group um out of samalia they appear to be making some kind of new alliance with the houthis in Yemen but also i mean this Sunni Shiite divide i mean i i continue to point this out as it relates to al-qaeda and the iranians it just doesn't exist there isn't such thing as a firewall between these two sex sub of of islam but man you know you just get a sense that they definitely have global aspirations all these different groups um all right i've been really generous with your time i got one last question for you and and this is gonna just broaden things out for just a minute you know take it back a little bit to current events um Pakistan has emerged suddenly as an interlocutor with the

25:17United States a um i don't know an honest broker with the islamic republic they're they're trying to i mean it's kind of amazing and they're negotiating with the iranians to uh relinquish their nuclear program ostensibly um and to halt their support of violent terrorist organizations when Pakistan let me just make sure i got this right oh that's right they were proliferators of of elicit nuclear material for years and major supporters of terrorism how is it possible that the pakistanis have arrived at this moment that they've so thoroughly rehabilitated themselves that they have access to the white house to the vice president's office and they're seen as the good guys in all i mean am i taking crazy pills what's going on here i mean isn't that much difference that different than with cutter where cutter has been described as a front a frenemy of the united states in some respects supporting muslim brotherhood hosting

26:19hummus and other groups but also providing us with an airbase cooperating with us diplomatically be mean to lock your with the taliban i think uh pakistan is you know very much following you know following that lead in the censor emulating the cutteries and it's self-preservation as well i mean they're faced with the pretty intractable insurgency in blu-chistan which uh iran could choose to affect positively or negatively given the the common border uh pakistan is also extremely concerned about the rise of the pakistan-italiban the ttp and the threat that that poses and the lack of cooperation they seem to be getting from the taliban government in afgadistan so i think pakistan is trying to position itself in such a way that ensures um not just the survival of the current government and of of of senior officials there

27:20but that uh enables pakistan to kind of ward off threats from all different directions um i gotta say i don't trust these guys as far as i can throw them don't like that they're involved in any of this by the way don't like the paketarees are involved in any of their there's something about major non-natal allies that maybe reflect the fact that they're really not allies or major ones maybe there's something to it maybe we ought to just void out that whole category of alliances given how problematic they are but i suppose we're going to leave it there um wishing you a meaningful 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks and i know a lot of us are thinking about the wild roads that we've taken since then you have definitely been a leader in this space want to thank you for that and for joining us today on the fd-d morning brief of course thank you very much for having me all right good conversation there that's it for today and for this week wishing everyone a meaningful september 11th and a happy jewish new year to those who celebrate

28:24Monday's episode will be guest hosted by my very capable colleague brad bowman get ready to go deep on some of those military questions surrounding the multi-front war in the middle east that's a can't miss episode until then though you can always head on over to fd.d.d.d out of orge to peruse our expert super smart analysis and give your algorithm a boost by visiting our socials and if you love us or if you just like us as a friend you can always make that tax deductible donation over at fd.org-sash-invest we appreciate you and your support thanks for tuning in folks keep up the fight i'm johnathan chanzer as always signing up for fd.d