Transcript
MR. RON NESSEN: Good morning and welcome to Brookings. My name is Ron Nessen. I want to welcome you to this latest in a continuing series of briefings on the campaign against terrorism. I'm going to introduce you in just a moment to the moderator, Jim Steinberg, who will introduce the rest of the panel. Today's briefing will focus on both diplomatic and military developments, as well as an interesting survey that measured the change of attitude among Americans toward their government officials and government appointees since September 11, and also a view of part of the war called the information war.
We want to welcome especially those who are watching on C-SPAN. And I just want to say that you can find the transcript of this even by this afternoon, as well as a great deal of background information on the anti-terrorism campaign at the Brookings website, at www.brookings.edu. The moderator of this morning's panel, who will introduce the rest of the panelists, is James Steinberg. He's vice president and director of the Foreign Policy Studies Program here at Brookings—former deputy national security advisor.
Jim.
MR. JAMES B. STEINBERG: Thanks, Ron. Welcome to you all. This is our sixth weekly briefing since the attacks of September 11, and this week, as in past weeks, has been a very active and interesting one. On the military front, we've seen an intensification of the attacks within Afghanistan and a growing willingness of the administration to begin to acknowledge that there is at least some presence of small numbers of ground troops in Afghanistan.
We're also seeing an intensification of the war in the air in a different sense, that is, the information war in the air. And this morning, Peter Singer, our Owen Fellow, is going to discuss how that campaign is going. We're also seeing intensification of the activity to try to find and build a coalition government to replace the Taliban in Afghanistan. And we are also seeing the inevitable cracks and fissures in the attempts to try to keep the coalition together. We've had Secretary Powell in both Pakistan and India this past week, and Steve Cohen, our senior fellow here at Brookings, is going to talk about both the developments in Afghanistan and India and Pakistan.
The other area where there is a challenge to the efforts to sustain a coalition, of course, is in Israel, where we've had the site of this past week of an assassination of an Israeli minister, which has really rocked the region and will pose real problems for Secretary Powell and the administration in the days ahead. More dramatically, on the diplomatic front, we have President Bush now in Shanghai, notwithstanding the continued troubles here at home with the anthrax scare. We're likely to see in the next two days a positive statement from the APEC leaders condemning the terrorists and supporting, in general terms, the campaign against terrorism, although unlikely to see an explicit endorsement of military action.
President Bush has already met with President Jiang Zemin, a very positive meeting. It's one in which President Jiang gave President Bush at least a qualified endorsement not only of the attempt to deal with Bin Laden, but even by implication, a willingness to at least tolerate U.S. military actions in Afghanistan. And it represents a continued upward trajectory in the U.S. relations with Beijing, a trajectory that began before September 11, but has obviously accelerated dramatically.
And perhaps even more dramatically, the president will soon be meeting with President Putin. Over the past two days, we saw Russia announce that it's closing its listening post in Cuba, which is a very dramatic gesture, I think, to the United States. It's been an issue that's been of concern in Congress for a long time, and just last year, President Putin had declined to do this. So it's a reflection of how the events of September 11 and the subsequent diplomacy are really beginning to shake up the international scene.
And we're also seeing reports that there may be even a more dramatic breakthrough between President Bush and President Putin in connection with missile defense, if not in the Shanghai meeting, then perhaps in time for the two presidents' meetings in Crawford in November.
The one sour note we've seen in Shanghai is the decision of Taiwan to boycott the meeting as a result of China's unwillingness to accept Taiwan's chosen representative to the meeting. And ending the sort of summary of the diplomatic front, our quote of the week is from Secretary Powell who said yesterday, "We're so multilateral, it keeps me up 24 hours a day checking on everybody." So let's turn to our panelists, first Steve, who will talk about events in South Asia, and then Peter on information warfare, and then finally, we'll have Paul Light, who is going to release the very important results of his surveys on how public attitudes toward the public service have changed in the wake of the events of September 11.
Steve.
MR. STEPHEN COHEN: Thank you.
I believe that the war has now entered phase two of what may be a protracted conflict. Phase one, of course, was the softening up phase where the U.S. went after specific targets in the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Phase two is that actual presence of American forces on the ground, possibly operating in conjunction with various Afghan resistance groups, the Northern Alliance, plus some of the Pushtun groups in the south, and we're not quite sure who else would be part of this military coalition.
I think this American ground presence, plus the heavy application of American airpower should be able to defeat or at least disperse—disperse is probably the correct word—si