--- title: Command Post: The 9/11 Response | TIME description: Has the U.S. overreacted to 9/11? A discussion with New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt, TIME and the Center for a New American Security canonical: https://time.com/video/42VvEaPL/ og:title: Command Post: The 9/11 Response og:description: Has the U.S. overreacted to 9/11? A discussion with New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt, TIME and the Center for a New American Security og:url: https://time.com/video/42VvEaPL/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/42VvEaPL/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Command Post: The 9/11 Response twitter:description: Has the U.S. overreacted to 9/11? A discussion with New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt, TIME and the Center for a New American Security twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/42VvEaPL/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Command Post: The 9/11 Response > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Command Post: The 9/11 Response [Watch (HLS stream): Command Post: The 9/11 Response](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/42VvEaPL.m3u8) (5:38)  _Published 2011-09-07. Has the U.S. overreacted to 9/11? A discussion with New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt, TIME and the Center for a New American Security_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:17 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Command Post: How the Military Has Adapted Since 9/11](/video/SwrIDpjs/) ### Command Post: How the Military Has Adapted Since 9/11 [Command Post: The 9/11 Effect](/video/KgmASIVY/) ### Command Post: The 9/11 Effect [Command Post: Why No U.S. Ground Troops in LIbya?](/video/V1qiTfPo/) ### Command Post: Why No U.S. Ground Troops in LIbya? --- ## Transcript This is Command Post, a series of discussions about military matters. From Time and the Center for a New American Security. Eric we, we as a nation I think made an extraordinary series of responses to the attacks of September 11, we've built a whole new intelligence infrastructure. We, we've toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, pursued Osama bin Laden, into Pakistan where we lost him for a number of years. Invaded Iraq. The, the, the impact of, of this actions of a very small group of people has been extraordinary. Do you think we, as a nation, overreacted? I, I think we did, John. I think, at least at the beginning of the conflict, and that may have set the tone for the rest of the, of the decade. I think understandably after the 9 / 11 attacks there was the instinct of the nation. Particularly the military intelligence community. Was to try and kill and capture your way out of this, this fight against Al- Qaeda. The problem was, the government in general, for the most part, did not really know much about Al- Qaeda and certainly not about terrorist networks and how they operate and what was the best way to combat them. So the idea you should gonna go in. Whether it initially be, Afghanistan but later in Iraq with a large footprint of the American soldiers, really doesn't work very well. And we saw this in, in Secretary Rumsfeld's famous memo, late 2003 with all the efforts there and by then you have the insurgency rising in Iraq and he asked the questions of his top military and civil, civilian advisers. Are we actually generating more militants here than we're taking off the battlefield? And if so, why is that? And why can't we get our arms around it? And, and what that did, I think, was lead to some actually, some very innovative thinking within the government and particularly in the, the bowels of the pentagon. And then the whole idea and we write about this in our book, was are there elements of cold war deterrents, that is the theory that basically kept peace between the United States and the Soviet Union for all those decades, that we can apply today against Al Qaeda and terrorist networks. Now the initial reaction was of course not, Osama bin Laden and suicide bombers, they can't be deterred from attacking anybody, that may be true. But, the revelation and the understanding that scholars inside and and outside the government had was it takes more than those guys to carry out an attack. They rely on a network to do their stuff. So you have logistitians, you have financiers, you have gun runners. You have a whole wide range of people that these, these attackers really depend on. And these people don't necessarily have the same fervor that the suicide bomber does. You can deter them. You can put pressure on them in their livelihoods. And once you start taking out pieces of that network, it makes it much harder to carry out the attack. And at the very least, what we've seen throughout the decade is it postpones that day when there may be another attack. And also, drives down the ferocity of the attack what we're seeing. When we went into Afghanistan, the notion was we were gonna topple the Taliban because they gave sanctuary to Al Qaeda. But then it seemed to morph in, we're going to, rebuild Afghanistan into a country we can live with. We could have left in early 2002 with a victory with the Taliban gone. Instead, we've stayed a decade. We've tried to rebuild Afghanistan into a, a more representative country. Is there a sense that maybe if a, we'd left earlier and didn't, you know, invest so heavily in Afghanistan, we might be better off now? Well, I think the argument would be just the opposite, Mark, that we didn't stay long enough in Afghanistan initially. The job was not finished there. While the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Taliban may have been defeated, Al- Qaeda may have been driven out of Afghanistan after the 9 / 11 attacks, they were next door into Pakistan. They hadn't been totally eliminated. The U. S. took their eye off the key, the keyball at that point, which is the terrorist threat from Al- Qaeda and shifted to Iraq. A whole new theater and it also changed the international dynamics. We had the international community fully behind the United States' effort to combat Al Qaeda and its host government in Afghanistan, the Taliban. Once, once the U. S. shifted into Iraq, it became much murkier. We lost a lot of that support. And Iraq, which was not a terrorist haven beforehand, became a magnet for terrorism. Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan, it, the focus on Iraq allowed the Taliban, and to some extent Al Qaeda, to reconstitute. So that. As we go forward to, many years later, the, the threat, re, re, re asserts itself there, to face the problems that we are now addressing in Afghanistan today. Saint Augustine said that the only purpose of a war is to win a better peace, and we did not do the hard work required to win a better peace in Afghanistan, before we started fighting another war in Iraq. And we're only now starting to build that better peace. Build a post- war situation which is going to make future wars, future terrorist strikes less likely, both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. But after many, many years of great pain for the people of those countries for the, the soldiers, the military families, the people of the United States. And so I think one of the, the big lessons we have to learn from this last decade is, not just how to win battles, but also how to win the peace that follows. 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