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—significant Taliban units, and certainly Al-Qaeda, which would be the major target of this. This is going to lead to phase three sometime in the future, we're not quite sure when, when the Taliban are unable to control Kabul and really cease to exist as the, I won't say government of Afghanistan, because they never really were that, but as their claim to be the government of Afghanistan disappears.
And then, we enter into a very difficult phase three. The question is, will there be an Afghan government? If there is an Afghan government, what will the American role be in fighting the remnants of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban? Will we be joining with an Afghan government to engage in guerilla strikes and air strikes against these people? If so, what are the risks we run, how long will this take, and so forth? The history of Afghanistan would indicate this is going to be a very long and difficult struggle.
The other alternative is that there is no government in Kabul, that in effect, Afghanistan reverts back to civil war. Then clearly, the American role is even more problematic, and phase three is an open-ended commitment. I believe that the U.S. really has to make its warnings clear and its strategic claims clear and, at some point, decide when we've had enough with Afghanistan. Once we've achieved our strategic objective, that is, preventing Afghanistan from being used as a base for international terrorist operations directed against the United States, I think that should be our strategic objective, and I'm not quite sure whether we're going to declare it as such or not.
Now, my concern is raised by two quotes, one by the president and one by the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. The president said the other day, "And by the way, it may take more than two years and a variety of theaters," that is, the war against terrorism. It's not quite sure whether this includes Afghanistan, whether we'll be over with Afghanistan in six months, a year, two years, go on to something else. I think it's this sort of vague sense of an open ended struggle, because I'm not quite sure how we define the enemy except terrorism, which is a term that's highly controversial and much debated.
The other quote which gives me pause is by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Meyer: "This is the most important task that U.S. military has been handed since the Second World War." Presumably more important than the Cold War, Korea, or Vietnam. And I'm not quite sure what the logic of that statement is, but it does give me pause for concern.
Let me turn to South Asia, and it can be dealt with, I think, fairly briefly, because we've had good reporting on it. The most significant thing to come out of—two significant things have come out of the [Powell] trip [to India and Pakistan]. One is the U.S. has become more engaged still in the India-Pakistan conflict, particularly over Kashmir. Powell engaged in a marvelous diplomatic balancing act, placating the Pakistanis, indicating we're interested in Kashmir, then going to Delhi and saying, we're not that interested in Kashmir that we're going to actually force a solution of it on you.
So I think that his performance was at a very high level, and I hope it means a more enduring commitment of the United States to at least facilitate, if not a solution to the Kashmir problem, at least a dialogue to the Kashmir problem, the beginning of a peace process. And I think that process began about a year ago, and I think the U.S. is now participating in it, so I see this one positive outcome of the trip.
The second very important outcome is the announcement of a trip of Prime Minister Altal Bihari Vajpayee to the United States. I believe it's November 9. And this is important. He is the leader of the world's largest democracy. The Bush Administration had made a commitment to emphasize its relations with India. This commitment is apparently not going to be derailed by the war on terrorism. India is seen, to some degree, as a partner in this war on terrorism, but also as an important country in its own right. And we hope to have my book launch on India, which was scheduled for September 11. We hope to have that sometime in the next few weeks.
So I think that the South Asia situation on the surface seems good. What gives me pause is two developments. One is that Musharraf has publicly acknowledged that he's one of the few people in Pakistan to support the war. General Musharraf and the army do back us and they have provided logistics and intelligence support, and perhaps support which has not been made public. But clearly, he recognizes that this is not a popular war in Pakistan.
I understand that today, which would be yesterday, perhaps—we may be able to find it on the internet—a group of Lahore businessmen and would be politicians were going to take out a demonstration in favor of the United States to counter the many demonstrations against the Untied States and Pakistan. We'll wait to see whether that happens or not, but it would be an unusual development for Pakistan, and practically unique in the Islamic world. I mean, the support we've received from Muslim countries has been minimal at best. Let me stop there.
MR. P.W. SINGER: As the U.S. military continues to respond to the terrorist attacks of September 11, understandably, much of our attention has been on aircraft and missiles striking at targets within Afghanistan. But perhaps more important to the success of the operation is the use of words, images, and ideas to create an environment amenable to victory. Military planners call this information warfare, and a subset of this is psychological operations, which are designed to change adversaries' attitudes, and then behavior.
Unfortunately, while the U.S. is winning this battle over the airwaves and over perception at home, it's not clear yet that we're winning it where it counts: within Afghanistan and within the broader region. Today, I'd like to discuss the requirements of a successful information warfare campaign, the situation there now, and what are the elements of the operations that are being carried out today. In the Q and A, we can discuss the public diplomacy side, and the other people up here with me can probably handle it a little bit better than myself, particularly Steve.
The requirements for success, first of all, are fairly simple and, in many ways, they're akin to a successful marketing or publicity campaign. There's three. The first is that the message must be fully available to the target audience. Second, it must be dominant, rather than at a disadvantage in competing with other messages out there. This involves both the frequency of the message as well as the trustworthiness of the source. And finally, the message must be crafted to ensure a receptive audience. They must be both attuned to the local culture and the local environment, as well importantly take advantage of prior concerns of the audience.
Now, the information setting within Afghanistan has two key elements to consider when you're crafting this warfare strategy. First, is the nature of the opposition, and the second is their control of the environment. The key aspect of the Taliban is that they are susceptible to certain divisions. The Taliban leadership has never been a truly cohesive actor, it more reflects its quick takeover of Afghanistan from 1994 to 1996.
There's two potential fractures that an information war campaign can take advantage of. The first is the split between the relatively moderate elements—and I emphasize the word "relative" there—and the more orthodox factions that are based out of Kandahar. The second and more important one is between the original Taliban leadership and the warlords and local commanders who were either bought off or defected and can be peeled off later.
Unfortunately, until the start of our information warfare campaign within the last two weeks, the Taliban enjoyed a pretty much clear dominance over the information environment within Afghanistan. Very few people in the population had access to outside media resources. The Taliban controlled the main radio network there, Radio Shariat, and used it as a mechanism to broadcast their own view, which in particular focused on painting U.S. demands as falling in a long history of imperial powers attempting to impose their will upon Afghanistan.
These broadcasts evoked very powerful emotions. Throughout Afghan history, the one uniting influence has been acting against a foreign power, whether it's the Persians, the British, the Soviets. And the Taliban's hope was to put the U.S. within that framework.
In recent days, it's become apparent that the U.S. and its allies have begun to fight back in this battle of perception. The primary players in this information warfare campaign on the military side are the psychological operations groups within the U.S. Army and the 193rd Special Operations Wing, which is a Pennsylvania Air National Guard unit that flies EC-130s. These are called "commando solos," and they are essentially cargo planes that have been converted to either jam or broadcast radio and television signals.
The first step in this campaign was fairly simple: it was the takedown of the radio transmission towers, and this happened within the first couple of days. At some point after this, limited communication links were established with the Afghan populace. The operations now involve two elements: intermittent radio broadcasts and the dropping of leaflets. The transcripts of these broadcasts and also the leaflets are now available from the Pentagon. So that's what we have to go on-on what's happening on the ground there.
We don't have any reports yet of the dropping of rechargeable radios, as they did during the information operations within Haiti in 1993. And this may be something that we need to consider to do in the next couple of days to ensure that the local audience, a broader audience, gets our message.
Now, while the means are important, ultimately, it's the message that will determine the success of the operation. A successful information campaign within Afghanistan will involve three elements, each of which involves shifting the paradigm through which the conflict is understood. Some of these are occurring to the full extent possible right now, and some aren't. And to go on this, we basically have information we've received from the Pentagon. So there may be more out there that we don't know about. So that's sort of my preface here.
The first is that we're attempting to recast the enemy. An attempt is being made to reverse Afghan nationalism from focusing on the United States to focusing on the foreign fighters and foreign influences within Afghanistan, specifically Al-Qaeda and bin Laden. Dating back to the Soviet war, there has been tension between native mujaheddin fighters and foreign fighters, importantly, the Arab mujaheddin. A carefully managed program can further broaden the rift between those and attempt to drive a wedge between them.
It's become apparent that we're targeting these foreign fighters more in our actual weapons strikes in the last couple days, specifically the 55th Brigade, which is a group of Arab fighters that's been recruited by bin Laden. It's important that we start to coordinate this with information war efforts, letting the rest of the Taliban military know what we're doing and attempt to spread some more dissension in the ranks.
The transcripts also show that we're trying to create a contrast between the deeds and words of bin Laden and the Taliban. The transcripts go over how the Taliban has not fulfilled their promises of bringing peace and security to Afghanistan, and this is something that we can attempt to build on further. We should also keep the broadcasts tuned to the local situation on the ground as things develop.
One thing that we should add to this is to bring up their recent seizure of food supplies and shutdown of humanitarian aid facilities in the midst of a famine. A contrast can then be drawn with U.S. efforts to provide food aid and the years of food aid we've provided in the past. You could combine the food drops that we're giving with more information warfare elements, specifically, making sure that we're providing both leaflet drops and food drops at the same time and mixing them in together, and also, that the humanitarian rations are printed in local languages. Right now, they're not, so people aren't getting the full message there.
The second component is to recast the nature of the conflict. The Taliban and Bin Laden have attempted to turn opposition to the United States as part of a jihad. We need to reverse this and try and undermine their credentials to speak for Islam, and show that a fatwa issued by Bin Laden doesn't carry any kind of weight, that the Koran doesn't license the killings of innocent men, women, and children. And that's what these messages have shown.
This aspect, though, requires a slight change. We can't have exclusive U.S. sources and U.S. speakers providing this message. We've got to have voices that carry a little bit more legitimacy within the audience. They should emphasize and quote Islamic leaders who give these messages. Two important messages that we can send out is, first, the Saudi government's statement that accuses bin Laden and the Taliban of besmirching Islam with their activities. And secondly, a fatwa issued by a group of prominent scholars that says that it's just to punish these terrorists. This is an area where we can call for a little bit more help from our allies who have not been so forthcoming in this. One aspect to maybe pull them in is to try and get them to be a little bit more vociferous in support of our humanitarian efforts.
Finally, it's important to recast the ultimate goals of this operation. A constant and repeated point is to try and make real the impact of the attacks within New York and make it more personal for the audiences there. They reference Muslim women and children killed in the attack on New York, and this is a real important way of trying to touch the audience, and it's a very effective way.
An added thing they can bring into this is maybe add Afghan Americans telling their relatives who are still in Afghanistan not to worry, that they weren't killed in Bin Laden's attack. And this is sort of an indirect way to send the message that there are people being attacked within the United States that people on the ground may care about.
Equally important, however, is to make known the long term objective of the United States here. The Taliban have sent the message that we are an imperial power who want to impose our will and impose our government there. We've not yet responded to this on the ground, and in part, it's probably because we haven't yet developed what our long term political objective within Afghanistan is.
One thing that we can do that I would urge is to broadcast support for the Loya Jirga, which is the traditional Afghan parliament. It dates back several centuries, and it's been one of the few institutions that enjoys support across the different ethnic groups. It's also an Afghan only institution, meaning that broadcast support of this would illustrate a concern with letting Afghans determine their own destiny.
Equally important, the loya jirga has been something that the Taliban has been split on in the past. More moderate elements have supported it in the past, but they were brought down by more extreme elements. So broadcast supportiveness can split it. Finally, it's a way to use short-term information operations to link up to long-term objectives in the region. The Loya Jirga might provide a way to sort of repeat the peace process within Cambodia, where you have a figurehead of the king, in this case, Zaher Shaw, and a broader parliament that brings in all the different groups.
So, in conclusion, I just wanted to note that we talked here about the short term information campaign, but it's going to require a much longer term and broader operation to change those perceptions out there.
MR. STEINBERG: Thank you, Peter. Paul.
MR. PAUL C. LIGHT: Good morning.
I'm going to assume that you've been following the issue of public movement in the polls, and so I'm not going to give you a detailed background around that. What I want to do is get into some data that we've collected over the last several weeks regarding changing public attitudes towards government, its leaders, its employees, its appointees.
By way of introduction, first, I want to thank the team that brought this survey to fruition. The interviewing was done by Princeton Survey Research Associates, under the direction of Mary McIntosh, who is vice president at PSRA. Our team at the Presidential Appointee Initiative was on this from the very beginning. They were all terrific. Those of you in the audience who have a copy of the survey, you've got it in front of you; those of you who are watching can visit our website at www.Brookings.appointees.org.
The survey that I'm going to report on was conducted between September 27 and October 6. It came out of the field before the bombing began. 1,033 adults, margin of error here plus or minus three percent. It's a very good survey, I think. Two broad areas of conclusion in the survey, first, deals with the surge of trust in government. There is no question that the events of September 11 and the events that followed, in terms of how President Bush and the senior leadership of government responded to those events has created a dramatic surge in trust.
Trust in government, in general, the general question being, "Do you trust government?" That measure is up 17 points in the wake of September 11, looking back to the survey that we did in late July. Trust in government to do the right thing all of the time or almost always, up 28 percentage points. Favorability to government, the number of Americans who say that the government in Washington or view the government in Washington as very favorable or favorable, up 28 percent.
Favorability for all leaders of the federal government that Americans know is up dramatically. The highest gains in favorability—this is not job approval, but favorability, I mean, we asked the question "How favorable do you feel about President Bush," very, somewhat, and so forth down the line. George Bush gained the most in the wake of the September 11 events. He was tied as the lowest among the favorability ratings for political leaders in July.
Americans didn't really know him very well at that point. They liked him personally, but they did not feel particularly favorable towards his leadership. In July, 57 percent of Americans felt very or somewhat favorable towards Bush; today, that number is in the low 80 percent range. Chaney also moved up. Appointees moved up 19 points in the wake of the September 11 crisis, in terms of favorability. Elected officials, such as members of Congress, moved up 13 percentage points; federal employees moved up seven points.
Now, the reason federal employees didn't move up further was that they were the most highly favorable group in July. Americans were looking on federal employees in July—69 percent of Americans felt very or somewhat favorable towards federal employees, federal government workers, to be specific about the question in July. That number moved up to 76 percent in October.
Let me spend a moment on what this all means. I've been asked several times in the last couple of days, does this mean that Americans are ready for the era of big government again? Do they want more government? Do they want airport security screeners to be federal employees as opposed to contract employees? I rather suspect on that particular issue that confidence in government contractors has not gone up, but I'm not sure about it, at least in some areas. We did not ask about contractors.
Frankly, you know, much as I'd love to believe that Americans are saying they believe that the federal government can do this job, they feel emboldened and they know that the federal government is going to respond, I believe these figures show a surge in hope, a surge in desire for government to win the war on terrorism and improve homeland security. But there are lingering doubts in our survey data about whether the American public actually believes it can be done.
When we look at the number of Americans who said in July that government's bigger problem was that it had the wrong priorities or that it had the right priorities but was inefficient, those numbers haven't changed at all. Americans still believe the federal government's bigger problem is that it has the right priorities but is inefficient. Moreover, when we asked Americans what they think motivates federal employees, I'm sorry to say that those numbers have not changed in the wake of the September 11 crisis. Americans still believe that most federal employees come to work for the job security, the benefits, and a secure paycheck.
That speaks to sort of a lingering doubt about government's ability to respond to crisis, and we'll be releasing on October 30 a major report on the state of the federal public service, which suggests that federal employees themselves believe that they are under resourced, under supported for the task that they were doing in the summer and for the task, I believe, that they are doing now.
I believe the surge in trust in government is an expression of hope that government will be able to fight and win this war, but I'm not sure the American public believes that government is ready to do so. There is one figure that I would say is dramatically up that I just point out as a sidebar. The number of Americans who would recommend a job in government to a son or daughter if they had one is up from 30 percent in July, to 39 percent by October. Given a choice between two jobs, equal jobs in the private versus the federal government, Americans now are slightly more likely to recommend a job in government to their hypothetical son or daughter. Our analysis of that statistic suggests that it's caused by fears of the worsening economy, not by an emboldened sense that this is the place to go to work.
Let me talk about number two, the dramatic turnaround in views of presidential appointees. I'm going to run through this very quickly. The knowledge of the presidential appointments process has not changed much at all. Americans still know a fair amount about the presidential appointments process. They are paying more attention, they say, to news about who the president is selecting to fill the key jobs in government.
In terms of name recognition and the ability to match the appointee to the job, Donald Rumsfeld has been the most significant gainer in terms of public visibility. In July, only 20 percent of Americans could correctly match Don Rumsfeld with Secretary of Defense. By October 6, when we polled this survey out of the field, 40 percent of Americans could correctly match Rumsfeld to secretary of defense.
Colin Powell still remains the most visible and known presidential appointee, but Americans still can't figure out whether he's secretary of defense or secretary of state. There's still confusion about what his position is. John Ashcroft remains at about 40 percent of Americans who can correctly identify that he's attorney general. That has not changed much since summer, and that was a byproduct of the controversy surrounding his appointment earlier this year.
Perceptions of the fairness of the process and its ability to find good people remains essentially unchanged. The majority of Americans still believe that political considerations play too big a role in the selection of political appointees. Americans still believe that the process is too harsh. They've become slightly more willing to say that the media asks too many personal questions about presidential appointees, and they now believe that the process is taking too long.
Of Americans who know that Congress plays a role in the confirmation of presidential appointees, 43 percent of Americans are willing to sacrifice the rules to get the job done. They want these positions filled. And I would say parenthetically here that Americans do not know that there are significant vacancies in the top jobs involved in the war on terrorism. We count a grand total of 164 presidential Senate confirmed positions that are involved in the war on terrorism as of today. That included virtually every presidential appointee in State, every presidential appointee in Defense, positions in Health and Human Services, Transportation and so forth.
Of those 164 jobs, 118 are filled with a person as of today, confirmed or a holdover from the Clinton Administration. That's a fill rate of 72 percent. Twenty-eight percent of the jobs involved in the war on terrorism, bio-terrorism, or homeland security are currently empty, 46 of 164. Of those 46 positions that are empty, 16 have been nominated, 9 have been announced, and 21 have no one designated yet as an occupant, and that includes the commissioner of food and drugs. There's been no announcement about who will be the president's appointee to food and drugs, and there's been no announcement about the director of the National Institutes of Health.
We also have a surgeon general, who you may know, has been persona non grata in the White House for much of this year. He is starting to be more visible in the conversation about bio-terrorism. You'll see more of him. A surgeon general is one of the most well known positions in government in the American public, and you can understand the impact of that position on American attitudes and American comfort with the war on terrorism just by imagining that if C. Everett Koop were still surgeon general, he would be out front in front of the cameras talking about what's going on here.
Now, the one area where attitudes towards presidential appointees have changed dramatically is in the image of appointees in terms of how hard they work and what they care about. Back in July, the majority of Americans believed that presidential appointees were motivated primarily by self interest, by the desire to get ahead, by the desire to make connections that would help them later in a career. That figure has changed 180 degrees. Americans now believe that presidential appointees are motivated primarily by the desire to serve their country.
They also see appointees as suddenly more capable, patriotic, honest, and hard working than they did in July. And you can see that data on this report, and again at our website. Why the surge? The same kind of effect that we think is going on with trust in government. The likely cause of the surge in respect for appointees, the sense that we ought to get them into place faster, the sense that they're doing the right thing, the sense that they are hard working and capable is, I think, a projection of the hope that that's what they are. Also, perhaps, and we'll see this later as the studies of media effect emerge, that there's probably some effect of how presidential appointees have presented themselves publicly, and most certainly an effect of how appointees like Donald Rumsfeld have handled themselves in leading the war on terrorism.
Let me conclude by saying that this is a moment of great stress and testing of government. If it is true that the surge in trust in government is partially a rally around effect that we see in moments of crisis, and this is most certainly the greatest rally around since 1941, when we did not have data collected on trust in government. We would guess that it's so. If this is in part a rally around, in part an expression of hope that government can do its job, then the surge is only sustainable if government does its job.
And that takes us to conversations about whether Tom Ridge has the authority to coordinate agencies, whether or not we're prepared for bio-terrorism, how are we doing on the presidential appointments process, do federal employees and agencies like FBI, Border Patrol, INS, Customs Service, do they have the resources to do their jobs? Americans are right now saying that they want government to succeed. There's no place else to turn to in terms of fighting this war. What we're seeing in this data is a tremendous surge, I believe, in expectation that government is going to be able to respond.
And the question before us, on October 30 I think, is how well prepared are federal employees and federal agencies for fighting and winning this war? How well prepared is defense, how well prepared is FBI, how well prepared is INS? Americans do trust government, in part, on the basis of the performance of government. Right now, expectations and hopes are very high. The question before us is whether government can meet those hopes and expectations. I believe we have a work force that is deeply committed to making a difference and having an impact on this war on terrorism. The question that I have is whether they have the resources and tools to do their jobs well. That's my presentation.
MR. STEINBERG: Thanks, Paul.
Okay, I'm open to your questions. If you would please raise your hand, and we have mikes moving around. And after you get the mike, please identify yourself and then ask the question.
MR. MATLACK: Jim Matlack with the American Friends Service Committee. My question has to do with the humanitarian side of the Afghan situation, which is a very difficult one. But for Stephen Cohen, how do you see an effective, integrated humanitarian process working, if at all, in the midst of the ongoing hostilities?
MR. COHEN: First, there has been an ongoing humanitarian operation for Afghanistan, and ironically, the United States has been the largest supplier of food and money for this program. It might be possible—and I think this is an urgent matter—that some agreement be reached among all the parties, whether they be Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Americans, Pakistanis, Northern Alliance, and so forth, that there will be a humanitarian process continuing, even if there is no government in Kabul, or if there is a government in Kabul and it has to fight a civil war, or it has to fight a limited war against various elements in Afghanistan.
And the problem is that both sides occasionally use the humanitarian assistance process for their own purpose. I think this would just have to be written up as part of the cost of war. As long as food is going in and being distributed, we shouldn't care too much as to whether one group or another group is using it for their own political purpose. Because I think the humanitarian requirement is so great, so vast that this should be—
So I would say that either under a UN or larger international auspices an agreement be reached among the different warring parties that even if they can't agree on the kind of political structure Afghanistan will have, and they can't agree among themselves as to who will be the new government, at least they can accept the presence of an international humanitarian assistance program.
MR. STEINBERG: Let me just add a point on this. I mean, I think we're facing a very difficult set of choices in the next couple of weeks as the weather begins to deteriorate in Afghanistan. And if, in fact, the U.S military campaign continues to intensify, most relief organizations now are reaching the conclusion that they cannot operate safely in the region. And there will be, I think, a lot of pressure on the United States to consider whether some kind of either pause or relief corridors need to be opened.
It was a problem that was briefly faced in the context of the Kosovo war, but because so many of the refugees were outside of Kosovo, it never became as intense of a problem as it potentially could be here, particularly since all the neighboring countries are making an effort to keep our refugees within in Afghanistan and not let them flee the country.
Q: Miles Benson, Newhouse Newspapers.
Mr. Singer, you referred to the need for a psy-operations of a broader nature than just Afghanistan, affecting the whole region. Could you elaborate a little on what's going on in the region at large, number one. And, number two, I wonder if what we're seeing in this country in terms of the panic over anthrax and the reactions about civil liberties, is it perhaps a signal that we're getting our butts kicked in this info war situation?
MR. SINGER: Really, that speaks to the public diplomacy side. And we've seen sort of a catch up game being played in the last week, specifically Secretary Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice going onto Al Jazeera and attempting to tell our side of the story. It was a little bit too late. We probably should have crafted that message earlier and attempted to reach Arab audiences a lot earlier. Before our primary outreach was just Voice of America Arab World, which only reaches about two percent of the population. That's not enough.
Equally, just as within Afghanistan, American voices are going to be looked at with some dubious nature. It's the same thing with this outreach. We probably should have lobbied to get some American Islamic scholars interviewed on Al Jazeera, as well, so it's not just our government officials trying to tell the justness of our cause, but also get some people who will be trusted by the audience. In the long term, it's going to take a broader effort to change perceptions out there.
I think it's been a shock to the American public that we're not as popular in the world as we think we are. And it's going to require both a top down approach from government officials being more open to media sources in other countries, but also a bottom up approach, making sure that we have cultural centers, education programs, things like that within all these different states.
On the anthrax side, you know, that's more on the domestic side of our fear. I, as of yet, haven't seen anything that indicates in the region that Bin Laden's getting a push out of this, specifically within Afghanistan; I doubt that the news has even hit there. But there is a point that we need to have a unified message coming from our government, and it took a while for them to get that together, a little bit too long. In the end, this wasn't a huge catastrophe, it wasn't a threat to society as a whole, and it's only now that we're starting to get the message that this is isolated, it's not contagious, it's sort of the Unabomber level of terrorism. But for a while, it felt a lot worse, and we weren't getting the message out there.
MR. LIGHT: I think that, you know, on the domestic side, that we have never been pressed as we are right now. And I think that the agencies of government on the domestic side are really struggling as to how they create a coordinated message. When Tommy Thompson gets up to do his first briefings on anthrax, he has nobody standing behind him from the Food and Drug Administration, or from CDC, or from NIH, or from the Surgeon General's Office to say, you know, okay, here's what we're going to do about it.
Whereas the Defense Department has faced several major crises over the last 50 years that have forced it to deal with communication internally, we just have no networks here. We've got a very clear silo kind of system where every different agency involved in sort of reassuring the public that public health is operating without much coordination. I think Tom Ridge, right now, has a tremendous problem ahead of him, as well as Tommy Thompson, to figure out how we're going to communicate to the public. We're going to see Surgeon General Satcher this afternoon, actually, talking about this. And he's starting to come out from the shadow that was imposed on him last spring. As a Clinton appointee with a termed appointment, he really has been kept out of the loop, and he's now coming back into it.
MR. STEINBERG: Just a final thought on this is the broader problem of warning that we're also facing. As we all recall last week, there was a bit of a flap over the question of whether the FBI should or should have not put out this new warning about a heightened risk of attack, and the question of what is the responsibility of government when it has generalized information that the level of threat may have increased, but no specific information as to where or how, and how you balance your responsibility to provide information to the public with a responsibility not to create a sense of panic, particularly when you don't have enough information that's useful to people to make decisions about where they should go or what they should do.
I think we're going to continue to see a lot of attention to this question about just how the government should decide when it should warn and how it should warn.
Q: Clare Lopez, Department of State. This is a follow-up question for Dr. Singer, and a little bit following on what the previous question was there. I wonder if you could comment on the info war or info-tech capabilities of the Al-Qaeda organization, and in particular, what might be their cyber capabilities.
MR. SINGER: Two things. As far as on the actual broadcast side, the public side of it, really, they have one outlet right now, and that's these tapes to Al Jazeera. The message, though, is a very effective message that they're sending. He's pointing out conflicts, he's hitting prior concerns, he's linking to these concerns, even if Al-Qaeda is not. For example, the Israeli-Palestine conflict. That's not been an issue for them in years past, but he's been able to tap into concern over that. The same thing with the Iraqi sanctions. So his message has been fairly effective and has met a receptive audience. He doesn't have the means out there.
On the cyber side, I've not seen anything about their offensive capabilities basically able to shutdown American sites, infect them with viruses, et cetera. However, they have used the internet as a means of communication and money transfer in times past, and that's been a difficulty for the intelligence and investigation side of this, is that they've sort of been lurking in the shadows of the internet.
Bin Laden himself, you know, I doubt he's got a computer sitting in the cave, but the communication between the different cells throughout the world, the internet has been used for that.
MR. COHEN: Can I add to that?
I think that what's less important than the technology and the instruments he has is the message that has gone out. And it doesn't come from him, it comes from a lot of sources, and it's a very complex message, but it adds up to one point. The components of the message include starving Iraqi children, critical on American support for Israeli, apathy to Kashmiri suffering, support of corrupt Arab governments because we want their oil, Jewish-Christian opposition to Muslims, and using and discarding the Afghans and other Muslims.
All of this adds up to a single point, to a single message, a very, very powerful one, not to us, but to Muslims around the world, that is, Muslims are victims, they have suffered, they are the ones who have been hurt by others, the Americans in alliance with these other nefarious forces. This gives Muslims the status of victimhood. And the morality and the psychology of a victim is very, very powerful. He can do anything he wants, or she can do anything she wants, to be gender equal, because he or she is the victim. And therefore, bombing the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, this is okay because you are the victim, and any act you take is legitimate.
This confuses ends and means, clearly, but it's a very powerful message to people who feel aggrieved or put upon for one reason or another. And once a community or a group, any group, it could be Christians, it could be Jews, it could be any group, gets a sense of being a victim, it's very, very powerful and very difficult to dislodge them from that psychology.
Q: — A question for Dr. Light. You said the work force appears to be committed, but you question whether they have the resources to do the job. Could you give me an idea of the kind of resources you'd like to see made available?
MR. LIGHT: When we meet again on October 30th to talk about this, we'll release a survey of federal employees along with a survey of private sector employees. I think the federal government has a terrific work force, and I would not trade the federal work force for the private work force right now. I think we've got the data to show just how strong a work force we've got, but that doesn't mean the work force doesn't have problems.
We have a hiring system that is notoriously slow, confusing, and is actually perceived as less fair than the hiring system used by private firms that employ our matched sample of private employees. When we ask federal employees, do you have the information you need to do your job, do you have the information technology to do your job, do you have the training to do your job, and do you have enough staff to do your job, the federal government flags significantly in comparison with the private sector.
I'll give you one little factoid: 59 percent of the federal employees who are working in the key agencies involved in the war on terrorism, state, defense, justice, treasury, FEMA, elements of transportation, some in HHS, 59 percent of that work force say they only sometimes or never have enough staff to do their jobs. Now, is that the effect of persistent downsizing over the last 12 to 15 years? Is that the effect of just sort of natural complaining that you're overworked, that you're burning out?
In the private sector, we see some of the similar complaints, but nowhere at that level as we see in the federal government. What I'm going to argue in two weeks is that both the war on terrorism work force and the rest of the federal government is an under resourced work force. It is poorly served by the systems that it has in place. It does not have adequate access to training technology information. It does have staff shortages. And we're going to see the federal government grow over the next five years.
I project right now, in terms of total contract grant and fulltime equivalent civil service, that's contract workers, grantees, and civil service, that we're going to go from about 12 million fulltime equivalent federal employees on budget off budget, to about 13, 13 and a half million. It doesn't really matter whether the airport security screeners are contractors or federal employees hired under the civil service system. They're going to be working for the federal government.
And we're going to grow. We're going to see increases in staffing at agencies like INS, we're going to see it in customs service, we're going to see it at FBI. I mean, every FBI agent in the agency is currently working the terrorism issue. That's why it's so difficult to get appointees through the process right now. I'm not saying that any FBI agent should be pulled from the terrorism issue to do a field investigation for an assistant secretary for intergovernmental relations at a cabinet department.
What I'm suggesting in our work at the Presidential Appointee Initiative is that maybe we don't need to do full field investigations of all presidential appointees, especially lower lever appointees in non-vulnerable positions or non-security positions.
Q: John Moore, C&O Resources.
My question deals with the issue of victimhood that Stephen Cohen brought up and the upcoming month of Ramadan. And I'd ask two questions, one to Jim Steinberg. Would you comment on, should the U.S. government continue the military conflict during the Muslim month of Ramadan? And from an information point of view, how should the U.S. government portray that if that would be your recommendation?
MR. STEINBERG: Well, just speaking from two cases of personal experience, in December of 1998, during the Clinton Administration, we had a four and a half day bombing campaign against Iraq as a result of the Iraq decision to expel the UNSCOM inspectors. And that went basically about 36 to 40 hours into Ramadan. And our judgment at the time was that we had a defined military mission and that we ought to complete it, notwithstanding the fact that we knew that there would be some negative reaction to continuing during Ramadan.
We also had during Kosovo the question of whether the military air campaign should continue during Easter. And again, the decision was made not to have a bombing pause during Easter, on the grounds that Milosevic had not shown any consideration to his victims, and that continuing the war campaign was necessary. So my feeling is that given the stakes of the military operation here, that if the United States has legitimate targets, and particularly if it believes that continuing the campaign is necessary to keep the pressure on Al-Qaeda and save lives because of that, that it will be important to continue the campaign.
But that will put enormous pressure on the United States to deal with the kinds of issues that Peter talked about in terms of why this is and why the people who will be suffering during Ramadan will not be innocent Muslims, but rather be people who don't deserve the protection of the holy month. I think it will be a difficult decision, but it would surprise me if the campaign had a legitimate case to go forward absent the month of Ramadan that the administration would feel that somehow bin Laden and his associates would enjoy the benefit of a month long sanctuary because of the holiday.
MR. SINGER: I would just say that you have to, if you are going to continue with the strikes, on the information side, you have to incorporate Ramadan into your message. It's out there, you've got to deal with it, you can't just act as if this is a regular day as any other day. That means that you might change some of the messages that are being sent out there. You don't send as many of the broadcasts that are sort of, dear Taliban, we're here to hunt you down and kill you, those parts of the transcripts. You heighten the ones that take down their ability to speak for Islam. You focus on telling more of the humanitarian side. The basic point is that you have to deal with it, you can't just ignore it.
MR. COHEN: Let me add one point. If you have three Brookings scholars, you're going to get four or five opinions. I think that a cease-fire or a cessation of bombings should be seriously considered, both for its propaganda purposes, but secondly, to facilitate movement of humanitarian and food aid into Afghanistan. But primarily, the criteria shouldn't be whether there's military targets out there, but whether the political process is moving along, and whether a bombing would help or retard the political process. By political process, I mean the political dismantling of the Taliban and the coming together of various Afghan elements, whatever they may be, to form a new force.
And I think that should be an important criteria, perhaps the determining criteria about a halt. But all things being equal, halting bombing during Ramadan would be a good thing in terms of a larger message to the Islamic world.
Q: Koto Matakari (sp), National Endowment for Democracy. The question is for Steve Cohen. You seem to suggest that we might soon be approaching a kind of endgame stage as far as Afghanistan. You are more concerned about the open-ended nature of the war on terrorism, but Afghanistan, probably there seems to be a need for thinking on what the endgame would be. Now specifically, what kind of a role do you see the U.S. should play in that state, especially after the formation of a government? Should the U.S. continue to have an overseer role? Should it be the sort of lead manager of a United Nations force out there? And what else do you think needs to be done in a post-conflict situation?
MR. COHEN: Yeah, the United Nations has said, you know, not us, not right away. You know, they're not eager to go in there, certainly with a UN peacekeeping force in Afghanistan, that would be inconceivable. And without a peacekeeping force, there's a strong possibility that war might continue in Afghanistan. I think we should state very clearly that our primary strategic aim in Afghanistan is to prevent the country from being used as a base for terrorism directed against us and perhaps against other countries.
And any combination of governments or individuals that can provide that assurance or, in effect, the base is eradicated, should be adequate for us. Because I don't think we should hang around for an open-ended attempt to rebuild democracy in Afghanistan. It might be possible to go back to an earlier system where, in a sense, Kabul was a weak government, handled the foreign assistance that came in , distributed it among different provinces of Afghanistan, and everybody lived happily ever after.
And I think that's the game plan of the administration, but I don't know whether that's going to happen. You know, I think that could be a long shot, because so much has happened to Afghanistan, it may not be able to go back to an old system. And there may be no new system, no other system which will work for Afghanistan. So we could be faced with a perpetual war in Afghanistan.
Our interest is really threefold: humanitarian, keeping Afghanistan from becoming a place where other major powers engage in conflict with each other, and thirdly, keep Afghanistan from becoming a base from which terrorism is mounted against the United States.
Q: Finlay Lewis, Copley News Service.
Paul, President Bush, about two weeks ago in his speech to the senior executive service, made a big point of saying we have to guard against expanding the size of government. Does that suggest that it will be over his dead body that this government expansion that you foresee takes place?
MR. LIGHT: There's no way that the federal government can fight this war on terrorism without a vast expansion in its work force. The debate is whether those workers will be contractors or whether they'll be federal employees. The Senate currently has a bill that they passed unanimously, 100 to nothing, to create a new federal work force to deal with airport security. The House, Tom Delay and others have argued that there's no way they're going to let that happen.
There are alternatives to the two bills right now, one being that you could create a federal work force that would be scheduled for privatization after two or three years. That's an option. And we've seen that done in the Office of Personnel Management with the security investigation service back in 1995. But, you know, this is part of the game in Washington. We say we're not going to expand at all and there's going to be no new employees hired. That's a game that Bill Clinton played well. Al Gore on the campaign trail last year promised there wouldn't be a single new position created in the federal government under his administration.
And then, what you do is you use mandates to the states. You create the mother of all mandates in the form of testing of children every year, or you hire a bunch of new contractors to do jobs that might have been done in the federal government. The Bush Administration right now continues with a policy to outsource as many federal jobs or compete as many federal jobs as they possibly can. But at the end of the day, we've got a mission that requires 12, 13 million employees to deliver, and that doesn't include the 4 to 5 million state and local employees who work for the federal government indirectly, implementing mandates.
We've got a big mission. Anybody who says that the federal government's not going to grow in the next three to four years ought to say where it's going to shrink. Because the defense budget is going to skyrocket, we're going to be hiring new border patrols, new immigration inspectors, new customs inspectors; we're going to hire more FBI agents, we're going to hire more bio-terrorism experts, we're going to expand the research agendas of CDC and NIH.
We are growing. But an increase of one million in a work force of 12 million is not as significant as it would be if you were doing it all with federal employees. That's the big debate right now.
Q: How do you regard that kind of rhetoric from the President? Is that just his ideological touching of his political base or does he really mean that?
MR. LIGHT: I think this is a moment for inspiring the federal work force. I think it's a moment for saying we've had 10 to 15 years of benign and deliberate neglect in building systems, dealing with problems like civil service reform, fixing the presidential appointments process, and we're going to do something about that. We're going to create a work force and support a work force that can win this war on terrorism.
And I don't think we should be having debates about reminding federal employees that they spend the taxpayers' money. They know that. I think this is a moment where federal employees who are deeply dedicated to winning this war on terrorism need to hear that we're going to provide the tools, technologies, the training and we're going to do something about this hideously inefficient hiring process.
I mean, the real problem with federalizing airport security and hiring new civil servants, you know, the system for hiring federal employees is so notoriously bad and inefficient that we could be hiring for two years before we actually get the federal work force up. And that's why the Senate has said, okay, we're going to exempt this new work force from the civil service system. Well, that's a heck of a note, isn't it, that in order to hire this new work force, we have to exempt it from the civil service system.
And that leads me to say, you know, the president should stepping forward and saying, we're going to fix these systems that make it difficult for you to do your jobs, and we're also going to address the poor performer problem in the federal government because there are some poor performers who need to be either trained up or asked to leave. I think the rhetoric, basically, Finlay, is not helpful. I guess that's my point.
MR. COHEN: The question to Dr. Singer. My name is Ariel Cohen. I'm with the Heritage Foundation.
If you're looking at the current structure of information assets in the federal government, the USIA collapsed into the State Department, VOA, elements of AID, which can fund some of the programs that have informational content, do you see it as an adequate structure in terms of skills, language capabilities, and ability to develop and communicate messages, or do you think we need something new institutionally, either inside the federal government or outside the federal government, to address the information universes out there in the outside world, outside the borders of the United States, and particularly in the Muslim world, information universes that may have contributed to the appearance of overlapping networks of terrorism? And I don't mean only on Al-Qaeda, I mean other fundamentalist terrorist organizations.
Thank you.
MR. SINGER: I would say that it's pretty clear that those aspects of our foreign policy are under funded and don't have the assets that they need. The fact that VOA is only reaching two percent and not—we all know the problem with the appointee process with it. More importantly, language speakers is something that's almost every agency that's involved in this war on terrorism has not had enough language speakers for this region. That's a problem that continues.
I don't know if I'd recommend a whole new institution to deal with it, because in past problems, just because you create a new institution, it might not be the best way to go about it. These operations have been sort of the ugly stepchild of the agencies they've been within, whether it's the state department or within the military. And they're not integrated into overall efforts. That's something that needs to be paid attention to. We need a rethinking.
On the military side, we don't have enough EC-130s. They're not as glamorous as an F-22 jetfighter, but in the end, it might be a lot more effective to do a one for one trade. It will certainly be a lot cheaper. It's something that the unit is an Air National Guard unit. It's highly effective, but that speaks volumes about where it stands within things. The basic point is that these need to be integrated better, and most of that is more an attitude change within senior leadership, and an increase in funding.
MR. COHEN: Can I add to that on my own personal experience with the USIA in South Asia. I've been going there from 1963 onward. I spoke in the USIA first, I guess, in 1964, and they give you a free ride out there and you get a chance to go out and talk and meet a lot of people. I've seen a steady deterioration of the quality of the programs, the number of the programs, their range, their scope, and so forth. They've just been appalling. And you know, four or five of the centers I've spoken to in Pakistan are gone now, they just disappeared, in some cases because they were burned out, but in other cases because USIA didn't have the money to reconstruct them.
One in Sri Lanka has disappeared, a couple in India have gone. So I think that there has been an appalling sort of—you know, we won the Cold War, therefore we don't need to tell anybody about our message. If they want to find out about us, they can watch CNN, or C-SPAN, or they can watch American soap operas. That's the message. Or Al Jazeera. That's the message they're getting.
I think also, a very important aspect of this has been the decline of private initiatives with regard to contacts between Americans, especially in the Islamic world. American foundations used to be very active abroad, a whole range of cultural, educational, informational programs. They have pulled out of many countries. They have gone inward, there are new issues that they've discovered in the United States, they've sort of just written off whole swaths of the world. And some of the major American foundations simply don't care about the rest of the world. A few do, but most of them are ignorant. They regard that as somebody else's problem.
So I think there's been a vast under-funding of American information programs. Where they have been funded, they've been very successful. In Calcutta, for many, many years, there's been a U.S. information service, American Center. Even though Calcutta was the hotbed of communism in India, every one of those communist leaders went to the American Center, they were educated at the American Center, they learned about American from that center.
They would go out and give speeches and occasionally protest the center itself, but they learned about us. And it was a very profound impact on their?and now that they're in power in West Bengal, their policy has actually shifted to a pro-capitalism approach. They're still critical of us, but they actually know us, and that American Center in Calcutta was very instrumental in shaping many generations of Bengali public opinion.
So I think that this is an enormous waste of money. One F-16 or one Eagle could pay for the whole program around the world lavishly. And I would say it's a profoundly unfortunate neglect of a tremendous asset that we have.
MR. LIGHT: It's so nice to have a Heritage Foundation person here. You know, Slate reports that you have a fight song at Heritage now. And the word here is that we've got to draft one now for Brookings. I've been working on one set to "On Wisconsin" that says, "On Brookings, on Brookings, you're the best of all." But not very many people are adopting it. [Laughter.]
MR. STEINBERG: Let's take two more questions.
Q: Garrett Mitchell from the Mitchell Report. A question that really is in the realm of communications and information mapping.
I was intrigued by Stephen Cohen's parsing of the Bin Laden message and bringing it all together by identifying it as a victimology strategy. The question I have for the experts up there is, would anyone care to take a crack at what the pieces of the U.S. communications messages are? And, in particular, on the mapping side, what is it that we're saying to the homeland target audience? What is it that we're saying to the allied target audience? What is it that we're saying to the Muslim target audience?
MR. STEINBERG: Peter, do you want to start?
MR. SINGER: There is a divergence between the messages and the target audience. Within the U.S., the rhetoric is more about punishing and it's broader. We sort of moved from just the perpetrators of the September 11 to Al-Qaeda, to terrorism at large and the Taliban in general. That's not been reflected in some of the statements pointed within Afghanistan, and that's probably a good thing, that we keep it focused, in Afghanistan, on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, and not so much the broader Taliban.
But that's started to breakdown. And also, we're selling a little bit more of a humanitarian edge in some of the broadcast statements that we've made there. We haven't seen that emphasized as much on our side. That's something that's not been told to foreign audiences, not within Afghanistan, but within the region. That's something that we should highlight more. It may be because we haven't sort of built up that aspect of our operation.
But this is actually a case where you can have a divergence between the messages, at least, that you're sending within Afghanistan and sending to the home front, because you don't have a free flow of information across that. This wasn't possible in prior conflicts, it is possible here.
MR. STEINBERG: The flipside of that is that, with the exception of perhaps within Afghanistan, because it's such a media poor environment, it is very hard to have multiple audiences. And I think that the differences that Peter talked about are a major problem in the coalition building exercises. The broad characterization of this fight as one against terrorism broadly is one that clearly causes great anxiety for most countries. The sense that this is not going to be limited to, Afghanistan causes great anxiety.
We just had the recent incident with the letter to the UN in which the administration again foreshadowed the possibility of the use of military force elsewhere, which caused a lot of consternation not only in the Arab and Muslim world, but even among European and East Asian allies. Similarly, the rhetoric, sort of the very broad Manichean rhetoric of good and evil, I think, is something which has a very strong resonance in the United States, but isn't just being heard in the United States, but is being heard in much broader terms throughout the world.
And I think the nature of globalized communications means that, for the most part, what Peter talked about, is possible within Afghanistan, it is not possible for broad land. So you have to make some choices and recognize that you can't have too many different messages out there, or at least understand the tradeoffs that you're going to have to have. And I think you're seeing that a lot in the whole the ambivalence the administration has had about whether they want to characterize what they're doing now as a war on terror. Because the State Department doesn't use that expression; they talk about the campaign. The White House still talks about the war a lot. And I think it's going to be a continued tension as we go forward.
MR. LIGHT: Internally, do you remember that song that was popular a few years ago, "Don't Worry be Happy?" The internal message is worry, be happy, and it's not resonating very well—on the one hand have a threat from the FBI one day and constant agitation and fear, and on the other hand go to a ball game, go to the Mall, go spend money. And this is, again, the flipside of the organization of communications outward, is that we really haven't ever struggled with this in terms of what we say to the American people. I mean, you know, do we have appropriate stocks of Cipro or not? Do we have appropriate technologies or not? And it's a very difficult message to sustain right now.
MR. COHEN: I don't want to add anymore on the message, but let me add that the message that bin Laden is putting out is not only his message, it's put out in almost every mosque in the Muslim world. It's put out in the street corners, it's put out in the coffeehouses, it's something that students learn in the universities, in colleges in a lot of countries, and it's not simply confined to the Islamic world. This is a perception of America held by a lot of other people as well.
And part of this perception comes from speeches like Bush saying to the U.S. army, your job is to kill evil people. So does that mean everybody that gets killed by an American bomb is evil? I find this appalling, and I just don't see it as very productive, and it's a giant step backward in terms of the rhetoric we need to develop to explain our case, to explain that our policies are not always unjust, that we try to do our best. And we're open to criticism and comment, but I think we've lost the information war. The danger is whether we're going to lose it further as this war proceeds.
MR. STEINBERG: Last question.
Q: — Program on International Policy Attitudes. As you probably know, there's a widespread view in the Middle East that Israel was actually behind the Trade Tower bombing. Is that view present in Afghanistan, and is anything being done about it to try to correct that perception, any effort to bring together any Muslim leaders to investigate the information available?
MR. SINGER: I've not seen any source that reports that being the perception within Afghanistan. Obviously, we don't have very good polling there right now, but it hasn't been reported there in that way that I've seen in our reports. That does lead, though, again, you need to have your story told by people that are trusted, so that part of talking about this damage that we've taken and the lives that have been lost has to come from sources that are considered reputable by the local audience.
And so it can't just be sort of anonymous voices on the radio, it has to be identified voices. You know, the speaker is an Islamic jurist stationed here. Or someone that they've heard. Or, maybe not that they've actually heard the voice before, but just a personality that they trust. Also statements, again, as I mentioned, from the Saudi foreign minister are going to be taken with a little bit more credence than an anonymous voice on the radio or a statement from the defense secretary, the American secretary of state.
MR. STEINBERG: You know, we always credit the adversary for being much better than we are, but I wonder whether, in this case, that bin Laden and their network haven't made their mistake in the information warfare. The last couple of broadcasts where they basically forecast more planes crashing into high buildings and talked about sort of the positive side of the attacks, seems to me has undercut the effort to avoid responsibility by Al-Qaeda and bin Laden.
I mean, technically, they're obviously saying that they weren't responsible. But I would think, and again, it would be interesting to get more polling, my impression is that, certainly among governments, that there's much less pressure on the United States now to produce evidence of bin Laden's involvement. That these are almost self-damning broadcasts that certainly embraced the technique, if not the specific act, makes it much harder to say that these folks are innocent or that it somehow was a set up by Zionist forces, and the like. We are certainly hearing less demand for the white paper or the evidence than we heard two or three weeks ago.
Well, thank you all.