What have you learned since arriving to Stanford as a visiting fellow in Israel Studies about the need for education about Israel and the Middle East more broadly?

The twentieth-century English novelist, L.P. Hartley, once observed that “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Well, the Middle East is a foreign region; they do things differently there too. The Middle East is an enormously diverse, vibrant, and exciting part of the world, but it is not a mirror image of America. And that is something that, frankly, very intelligent, well-educated and well-meaning members of elite American institutions often find rather difficult to acknowledge. The notion of difference is uncomfortable to many of us. We fear that pointing to differences will paint us as judgmental and make us vulnerable to social opprobrium, or worse. But grappling with places that “do things differently” is essential if we are going to understand a complex and contested world. Grappling with places that “do things differently” is crucial if we are going to fulfill our duty of preparing our students to become leaders that face the world with truth, moral courage, and sound policy. We need more and better education about Israel, the Palestinian people, and the Middle East because we want to strengthen our capacity for deep empathy, and effective interaction with actors that are guided by different worldviews. We also need more and better education about Israel and the Middle East so that we both appreciate what we have here in the U.S. that the Middle East lacks, while respecting the things that are prevalent in Israel and the Middle East that can benefit the rest of the world. 

What will you be teaching this academic year, and what do you hope students gain from it?

This year, FSI’s Israel Studies program offers a rich set of educational opportunities, both inside classrooms and outside, in various conferences, panels, visits and webinars. If there was a truly special ray of light for me in the last academic year, it was our amazing Stanford undergraduate students. I taught my course "Israel: Society, Politics, and Policy" last spring quarter, and will teach it again this coming spring. I find that our students come to the subject with curiosity, openness, critical thought, and the capacity for historical and comparative political thinking. In a class exercise we did, some of them even managed to put together a plausible Israeli coalition government, which is more than can be said for most Israeli politicians.

The program recently hosted two events with Tzipi Livni, who has held several senior leadership roles in the Israeli government, including as opposition leader to Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. In your discussions with her, what did she say that resonated with you? What are some of your takeaways?

It was a tremendous joy to host Tzipi Livni here at FSI and have her interact with so many of our faculty and students. No one alive today possesses the depth and breadth of her combined experience in domestic Israeli politics and constitutional debates, international peace negotiations, and post-war diplomatic settlements. Given the current situation in the Middle East, her visit could not have been timelier.

What really struck me in the set of conversations Tzipi Livni held with faculty and students, was her emphasis on two related points. One is her insight that tactical military successes – even spectacular ones – do not in themselves translate into strategic gains, let alone long-term changes in geopolitical realities. If war, to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, is politics by other means, then military victories only matter if they are then leveraged for constructive changes in economic, social, and political conditions on the ground. Otherwise, tactical successes dissipate quickly and make little long-term difference. And second, the United States and its allies in the region – notably Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and, more tentatively, Saudi Arabia – currently lack a positive, forward-looking strategy for the future of the region. That vacuum will continue to be exploited by Iran, Russia, and increasingly China, at great cost to the peoples of the region and American interests. The blow of the October 7th massacre, and subsequent multi-front war faced by Israel at the hands of Iran and its proxies (based in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen) has derailed the broadly positive pre-October 7th dynamic of Arab-Israeli rapprochement and regional cooperation represented by the Abraham Accords. To counter what Ambassador Dennis Ross has called Iran’s “Axis of Misery”, we urgently need to articulate and pursue an alternative vision of peace, prosperity, and stability in the Middle East – what we might call a Middle East Peace and Prosperity Pact. Barring such a positive, forward-looking agenda, we are virtually guaranteed to continue on a downward spiral of war, instability, refugee flows, and state disintegration in the Middle East. This will play into the hands of the radicals in the region and serve Iranian and Russian interests, undermining American ones.        

How do you think the events of Oct. 7 and the ensuing wars will shape Israeli society and politics into the future?

The October 7^th massacre was not just another large-scale terrorist attack. It was what Anna Rebecca Levenberg and I described as a “Transformative Tragedy” that has already indelibly altered Israel and the Middle East, and will continue to reverberate for decades to come. On that day Israelis experienced their worst nightmare. Finding themselves defenseless for a few hours in their homes inside Israel (not settlements) they were attacked with a cruelty and glee reminiscent of the worst pogroms of the 14^th and 19^th centuries and the Holocaust. For one day, every single Israeli – and every single friend of Israel around the world – saw exactly what would happen to 10 million Israelis (Christians, Druz, Jews, and Muslims) if Israel was ever overrun by its enemies. The trauma has already produced five main outcomes:

Firstly, the social contract between the People of Israel and the State of Israel was broken on October 7^th and that fracture has been compounded over the past year by the excruciating failure to free all the Israeli hostages – 101 of which, alive and dead, are still in Hamas captivity. The breach of trust was also exacerbated by the Israeli government’s abysmal performance in the delivery of emergency public services in the weeks and months following the shock of October 7^th. Domestically, Israel will spend the next years, possibly decades, trying to restore or renegotiate that social contract and rehabilitating trust in the state. I don’t expect radical change in the next elections (scheduled for November 2026) but politically the Israel of 2030 or 2034 will be very different. Just like it took four years for the 1973 Yom Kippur War to bring about a transformation in Israeli politics and society, so will it be with October 7^th 2023 and the subsequent war, which is still ongoing.

Second, public outrage at the murder, rape, and mass kidnapping perpetrated by Gazans on October 7^th has moved the Israeli political map further to the right, though mainly to the center-right. It also makes Israelis less sympathetic to the real suffering of the Palestinians, the majority of whom are civilians caught up in the fighting in Gaza and anti-terror miliary incursions in the West Bank. The notion that Hamas’s massacre should instigate a process towards Palestinian statehood is now broadly seen by Israelis as an unacceptable reward for terrorism. This will make negotiating a two-state solution even more difficult than in the past, unless a credible new regional initiative addresses the Palestinian issue within a compelling broader package that would include normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, disarming of Palestinian militias, deradicalization of Palestinian education, and massive investment in economic development projects that would help ensure the stability of Egypt, Jordan, and a future Palestinian State. We must not permit the creation of yet another failed state in the Middle East that serves as a safe haven for terrorism.

Thirdly, October 7^th convinced the vast majority of Israelis that deterrence failed and that living in close proximity to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and Hezbollah is no longer a tenable proposition. October 7^th turned a disastrous Israeli strategy of concessions and accommodation into a strategy of active dismantlement of the “ring of fire” built by Iran around Israel’s skinny neck. A year after the massacre, there remain over 100,000 Israelis internally displaced from their homes and communities in the south, on the border with Gaza, and in the northern part of the country, on the borders with Lebanon and Syria. Anyone who knows how small Israel is, is aware that “on the border” means literally within hundreds of feet of a fence, with Hamas, PIJ and Hezbollah fighters waiting on the other side. The number one priority for the Israeli government right now is to restore enough security on those borders to persuade the 100,000 displaced that it is safe to go back home and that another October 7^th massacre will not take place, despite the repeated promise of senior Hamas officials to replicate the massacre again and again until Israel is annihilated . Reassuring the displaced is a tall order when trauma is fresh and trust is low. Israel is close to achieving that goal vis-à-vis Gaza, where Hamas and PIJ have generally been dismantled as a fighting force. As long as Hamas and PIJ are not able to be resupplied with Iranian missiles through the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, the risk of large-scale rocket fire from Gaza has been greatly diminished. Similarly, but much more challenging, in Lebanon the aims of the current Israeli campaign are to: (1) dramatically degrade Hezbollah’s vast arsenal of missiles, rockets, and drones; (2) find and blow up the extensive terror tunnel system built by Hezbollah on and across the border with Israel; (3) push back Hezbollah’s elite fighting force – the Radwan Force – from the border with Israel, and; (4) prevent Iran from resupplying Hezbollah.

Fourthly, the October 7^th massacre and subsequent war in Gaza and Lebanon, has put Iran and Israel on the path to direct military confrontation. For two decades, Iran’s strategy against Israel – pioneered by the late Kassem Soulaimani – was one of “annihilation by attrition” through proxies. The strategy was simple: if little Israel (economically open and dependent on Western support) could be made domestically uninhabitable, economically weakened, and internationally isolated, it would be gradually worn down and eventually become defenseless. And while Israel was busy fighting an endless war on multiple fronts – its people and high-tech economy suffering, and its international legitimacy undermined by images of dead children in Gaza – the Ayatollahs would be free to continue oppressing the Iranian people and building a nuclear bomb. Defeating Israel would be achieved not by one decisive blow, but by a million cuts from multiple proxies nurtured by Iran and housed in failed states across the Middle East. But sacrificing the lives of the proxy fighters – Afghans, Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and Yemeni – is so much cheaper for the Iranians than risking the lives of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Attacking Israel via Hamas or Hezbollah also happens to play much better for the Iranians on the BBC. Israel is made to look like Goliath fighting plucky “resistance movements” with exotic names in Arabic, not Persian. October 7^th triggered a process that would remove the veil of plausible deniability from the Iranian puppet-master. As Israel began to dismantle Hamas, the wizard of Tehran stepped from behind the curtain. The night between April 13 and 14 was pivotal. On that night Iran launched 350 projectiles – drones, cruise and ballistic missiles – at a range of miliary and civilian targets in Israel. And on October 2^nd 2024, as Jews in Israel and around the world were preparing to celebrate the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, Iran launched at least 180 ballistic missiles at Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. We are now at the beginning of the Iran-Israel War.

Lastly, Israelis, like Jews all over the world, were horrified by the ghastly scenes of celebration and “exhilaration” that exploded on elite university campuses in America, Canada, and Europe from October 8^th onwards – before Israel fired one bullet in retaliation. To witness some of the most privileged, liberal, and free young people in the world openly side with some the most barbaric, oppressive, and cruel terrorist organizations in the world, was no less shocking than the events of October 7^th itself. Israelis know that these displays of ignorance and bigotry are at odds with American values, and that the vast majority of Americans, including the majority of college students, want nothing to do with a worldview that pretends mass murder and rape is “legitimate resistance.” But they also know that shockingly few influencers came to their defense as their hostages were being brutalized in Hamas’s tunnels and as they were facing a multi-front war. The silence of human rights activists and feminist organizations was particularly deafening. The moral inversion of accusing, not Hamas, but Israel of “genocide,” simply serves as proof to most Israelis that they can only rely on themselves. The consequence of the last year is that virtually all Israelis – and the majority of Jews around the world – now understand the world to be far more ominous, far more callous, and far more antisemitic than they ever suspected before October 7^th. This will make Israel wearier of efforts at outside intervention and more determined to become more powerful and strategically self-sufficient. 

Scholars hosted by the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) on October 27 discussed the lessons of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and its relevance for understanding the current Israel-Hamas war.

The seminar, “1973 Yom Kippur War: Lessons to Remember,” was moderated by Larry Diamond, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at FSI who is also leading the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program at FSI. 

In his opening remarks, Diamond said, “Our hearts go out to the people of Israel and this struggle they have now in the wake of one of the most horrific terrorist attacks in anyone’s living memory, maybe the most horrific. And to all of the people in Israel and Gaza, who are innocent people who’ve lost their lives.”

Speakers included Or Rabinowitz of the International Relations Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting associate professor at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC); Gil-li Vardi, a former visiting scholar at CISAC and Stanford history lecturer; Professor Emeritus Meron Medzini of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s spokesperson during 1973–1974; and Ron Hassner, the Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science and Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies at UC Berkeley. 

Israel’s Nuclear Question

On October 6, 1973, an Arab alliance of Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur – the Jewish holy day of atonement. The three-week conflict was one of the deadliest Arab-Israeli wars. It ended with an Israeli victory, shaping inter-state relations in the region for years to come.

Rabinowitz addressed the nuclear dimension of the Yom Kippur War, quoting Richard Nixon, who said in 1972, “The Israelis have nuclear weapons. I’m not going to tell you how I know, but I know that.”

She said a “partial picture” exists of Israel’s nuclear capabilities during the 1973 conflict, and more research needs to be done. Back then, Israel and the U.S. had reached an understanding about Israel’s “ambiguous nuclear posture,” as well as an agreement that any U.S.-made fighter jets would not be used to deploy nuclear weapons. Regarding nuclear-equipped missiles, “we have to take it into account that this was probably a political signaling which wasn’t backed by an actual ability to put in a nuclear warhead on the ballistic missile, but we just don’t know,” Rabinowitz said.

She added, “I am convinced that Golda Meir would have shown nuclear restraint, even if a bilateral understanding had not been in effect with the U.S. – because it made sense, there were moral clouds, and the Israeli objective was to align itself with the U.S. and guarantee further collaboration, and that would have just backfired.”

An Evolving Military Strategy

Vardi said the Yom Kippur War generated a huge incentive for the U.S. military and others to later develop the “AirLand Battle Doctrine,” which emphasizes close coordination between land forces acting as an aggressively maneuvering defense, and air forces attacking rear-echelon forces feeding those front-line enemy forces. 

“It also taught the military leadership in Israel that their instincts are the right ones, that they should always be on the offensive. If war is coming, then they should always be very active about it – active to the point of aggression,” she said.

As for Egypt, Vardi said, they weren’t planning an all-out war against Israel if they didn’t receive help from the Soviet Union or elsewhere, and their tactical goals were therefore limited.

She also noted Israel’s battle doctrine, which rests on three pillars – deterrence, intelligence, and military decision-making, as well as a defensive strategy to be executed offensively, by transferring the battle to enemy territory.

This doctrine failed on October 7 when Hamas attacked Israel, killing more than 1,400 people in Israeli territory. “Israeli security perceptions will need to change,” Vardi said.

Confronting Hamas

On October 7, Medzini said, Israel was dealt its worst blow since 1948. “Totally unprepared, wrong intelligence, the army in disarray, leadership, very poor response. And, parts of proper Israel were occupied by Palestinians with a huge number of casualties.”

He said, “The entire country was stunned. How could this happen to us?”

The Yom Kippur War was totally different than today’s conflict between Israel and Hamas, Medzini said. In 1973 it was launched by mostly secular governments in Egypt and Syria, whereas Hamas is a religious organization. 

“We thought in terms of Western thinking or Arab thinking. We did not take into account that Hamas is a religious organization. If you read their covenant, if you look at the logo, it’s not only to destroy the Jews of Israel, it’s to destroy the Jews” everywhere, Medzini said. 

Hassner said Israel’s opponents erred during the Yom Kippur War by believing the Israelis would be unable to mobilize quickly. 

“Mobilization turned out to be very easy,” he said, “because everybody was in the same place. Everybody was in the synagogue. And so, unit commanders just went to the nearest synagogues and told all the young men to come out. The roads were empty, which the Egyptians seemed to be unaware of. Mobilization to the front may have happened at twice the speed at which the Israeli military had planned to mobilize, because nobody else was on the road.”

Also, Hassner said, a backlash effect can exist if one is attempting to exploit their opponents’ religious holiday – “you are going to unleash a certain amount of religiously motivated anger.”

Regarding Israel’s security situation today, Rabinowitz said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies reflect a deep miscalculation of Hamas since the terror group rose to power in 2007 in the Gaza Strip. After Netanyahu took office in 2009, “he went on the record saying that his main mission is to strengthen Hamas” by favoring it over other Palestinian groups.

Medzini said Israel has to conduct a major operation in Gaza to make sure that Hamas loses its military and political capabilities. “You can’t kill an ideology. You can’t kill a religion. But you can certainly destroy a military capability and capacity,” he said. But, Medzini also noted, “Where do we go from here? What’s the end game?”

Diamond spoke of reigniting the peace process and bringing back the two-state solution in a very actual manner. “I’ll note what I think everybody in the room knows that if Hamas is removed from Gaza, something else needs to go and fill that gap.”

Scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies discussed the global and regional implications of Hamas’ terror attack during a webinar on October 13, 2023.

Larry Diamond, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at FSI and William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, moderated the conversation. Speakers included Abbas Milani, the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies; Ori Rabinowitz of the International Relations Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting associate professor at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation; and Amichai Magen, of the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy, Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, and the inaugural visiting fellow in Israel Studies at FSI. 

Israel declared war against Hamas after the terrorist group infiltrated the country on October 7, firing thousands of rockets at residential areas, killing civilians, and inflicting the most lethal attack on Israel since its founding in 1948.

Diamond said, “The brutal October 7 attacks on innocent Israeli civilians by the terrorist group Hamas constitute one of the most appalling incidents of terrorism in our lifetimes.” He noted that for a smaller country the size of Israel, when compared to the U.S., their death toll of 1,200 that weekend is equivalent to more than 40,000 Americans – or more than 10 times the U.S. death toll on 9/11.

Impact on Israelis

Rabinowitz said Israelis have been deeply affected by Hamas’ atrocities. “It’s trauma being compounded by failure of the Israeli state and the army institution to respond immediately to all levels of this. It really brought to the surface images of the Holocaust.” 

However, she said, Israeli civil society is strong and resilient, and it’s taking on the role of providing what the government's institutions and leadership should have provided more quickly after the attacks. “Soldiers called up for duty were driven to the front by their parents and by family friends,” for example, she said.

Magen said Hamas’ attacks shattered three fundamental myths for Israelis. One involved the notion that Israel could coexist with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The second illusion that broke was the belief that the government of Israel and the Israeli Defense Forces could effectively protect the civilian population.

“The reason why this is a much bigger trauma than Yom Kippur (in 1973) is because on Yom Kippur there was a very high military death toll, but the civilian population was protected,” Magen said. "However, this time, thousands of Israeli civilians were massacred before the Israeli state could even respond."

The third illusion, Magen said, was the belief that global jihad was non-existent in today’s world. “This is a cautionary tale – sometimes Israel is the canary in the coal mine. What happens in Israel today may tragically happen in the United States or elsewhere.”

Iran and Regional Implications

Milani noted the speculation about whether Iran ordered the attacks, but said that misses the larger picture. “Iran created Hamas in this sense. Iran is the architect of the narrative” that the future of the Middle East must not include Israel.

He said the only solution for lasting peace in the region is a two-state solution (with a Palestinian state) and an Iran with a democratic government. But extremists are in power in all the involved countries and now this outcome is even more difficult, said Milani. “Iran has been adamant in undermining the two-state solution.”

Milani also said the Hamas incursions should end the illusion shared by some in the West that you can make enough concessions to the Iranian regime and it will change its support for terrorism. 

“This regime is not going to abide by laws, it is not going to abide by its commitments. It is murderously suppressing the Iranian people,” he said.

Iran, Milani believes, sees the Hamas attacks as a major turning point in its bid for regional supremacy and the demise of Israel. It wants to undermine the delicate normalization talks between Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. With Iranian-backed Hezbollah aiming more than 150,000 rockets at Israel, Iran is maneuvering for possibly a broader conflict and chaos that could see Israel confronting several fronts.

Milani added that his heart goes out to all the victims and the hostages of this ordeal, noting that the 2 million-plus citizens of Gaza are also hostages to this catastrophe. “Human beings should be considered as hostages in this brutal regime (Hamas).” Their lives should be protected as well, and this would be best for the future of the Middle East and for the future of Israel.

Factors Leading to Attacks

Rabinowitz said scholars in the future will need to examine how the more radical factions in the Middle East realigned and created such a situation, she said. 

Magen said Israel was too complacent in regard to their technologically-enhanced security systems, rife with domestic political polarization, and naïve that a deal could be struck with Hamas.

“Israel was clearly perceived to be vulnerable and divided internally, and the enemy pounced. We in Israel tend to think that we watch very carefully what is happening in the neighborhood, but the neighborhood also watches us,” he said.

With Iran nearing the nuclear threshold for a weapon of mass destruction, the West needs to be incredibly aware of this possibility, Magen said. 

Campus Conversations

Diamond and the scholars emphasized the need for civil dialogue and safe spaces for conversations on college campuses about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rabinowitz said the Stanford community is well-positioned to achieve this. 

She said, “We’re not in Israel and Gaza, and we can use this opportunity to foster more dialogue between the different groups, between different students, and I think that is part of our jobs.”

Magen said, “We must create constructive spaces for empathic and sympathetic analysis, conversation, and engagement. We need to talk about difficult issues – we live in a difficult world.” 

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies produced the webinar, “The Hamas Terrorist Attack on Israel and its Implications for the Middle East,” in cooperation with the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program, where Professors Magen and Rabinowitz are visiting scholars. The program was launched in September 2021 with the aim of deepening FSI’s academic expertise in geopolitics and democracy studies as it relates to Israel.

This story was originally reported by Melissa De Witte for Stanford News.

For those who remember Sept. 11, 2001, details of the day – the confusion, chaos and collective grief – are as clear now as they were 20 years ago when the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history occurred.

But many college students today have no memories of 19 al-Qaida operatives hijacking four commercial airplanes and killing nearly 3,000 people in a terrorist attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Teaching this next generation about the passion and the intensity that defined that pivotal moment is difficult, says Condoleezza Rice, who was the U.S. National Security Advisor at the time of the attacks.

For the new generation of students, 9/11 is now a part of history. “It would be like people trying to convey the intensity of World War II to me,” said Rice, who went on to serve as the 66th secretary of state of the United States under President George W. Bush before returning to her professorship at Stanford in 2009.

Rice, now the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution, was in the White House on that Tuesday morning of Sept 11. When she discusses the attacks with her students, her experiences on that day inevitably come up.

She is candid in her recounting. “That helps to vivify it because it’s a personal story,” Rice said.

Rice shares how, when the first plane hit the North Tower at the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m., she and others were uncertain about the cause of the crash. She remembers wondering whether it could have been an accident. But when the second hijacked plane hit the remaining South Tower 17 minutes later, Rice knew it had to be a terrorist attack on the United States.

Then there was the short period when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could not be reached because the Pentagon was also hit that morning, Rice said. She, along with other senior government leaders, were ushered into the White House bunker. She tells students that around noon that day, oxygen levels started to drop because too many people were crammed into the fortified space. “So the Secret Service was going around saying, ‘You have to leave, you are not essential; you have to leave, you are not essential.’ You would never plan for such a thing as that,” she said.

Inevitably, a student will ask her if she was afraid. Rice was so taken aback the first time she faced that question that she actually paused to think about it – and then concluded that she wasn’t. “I didn’t have time to be scared,” Rice recalled. “You can fear for your loved ones, but you are not allowed to feel personal fear. You don’t think about that in the moment.”

Rice also emphasized the importance of talking to students about how 9/11 transformed the world and that what seems routine today – such as additional airport screenings and the formation of new government institutions – didn’t even exist before the attacks.

“I try to help them understand how we are still living the effects of 9/11,” said Rice. “It isn’t an event that happened one day and then was over, but everything from the way that you go through an airport to something called ‘homeland security,’ which you didn’t have before 9/11.”

Teaching 9/11 Since 9/11

The attacks also introduced into the wider vernacular new places – like Afghanistan – and people – like Osama bin Laden – that students 20 years ago knew very little or nothing about.

Stanford scholars Amy Zegart and Martha Crenshaw experienced this firsthand on the day of the attacks when they found themselves in the surreal situation of teaching about 9/11 on 9/11. Both were so shocked by the unfolding events that they were unable to do anything except the one thing they were supposed to do that day, which was teach.

When they showed up to their respective classrooms – at the time, Crenshaw was at Wesleyan University teaching a course on decision making and foreign policy; Zegart at UCLA – they found them packed. There were more students in the lecture hall for Crenshaw’s course than were enrolled.

Students – horrified and trying to make sense of what was happening – sought clarity and comfort from their teachers, who just happened to be experts on the issues that would come to define the next two decades of U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

“When something that shocking happens, our natural inclination is to make sense of what’s going on together, right now,” said Zegart, who is a leading scholar on national security and the Central Intelligence Agency and is now a senior scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Students wanted to know more about the terms and names they were hearing for the first time that day, like jihadism and the Taliban. Over the months that followed came more complex challenges to explain: the global war on terror, torture, rendition, Guantanamo Bay, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is the world that today’s students have inherited. Even the current generation’s media, as Zegart’s research has shown, has become increasingly saturated with a proliferation of “spytainment”: movies and TV shows depicting, often inaccurately, the clandestine world of intelligence and counterterrorism operations.

Like Rice, Crenshaw has also found herself having to explain that none of this was normal before 9/11.

“I have to go back and say, ‘All this wasn’t always here before 9/11.’ I have to trace the trajectory of policy changes,” said Crenshaw, a senior fellow at FSI and the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Shifts in Emotion

In the first decade after the attacks, Zegart said her students were incredibly emotional about 9/11 and its aftermath, including the expansion of U.S. conflict abroad. A few years after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq broke out, Zegart remembers one of her students, a recently returned veteran, telling her that he was taking her intelligence class because he wanted to learn more about why he had gone to Iraq, and what his friend who had deployed with him had died fighting for.

“It was a really raw, personal experience for students studying foreign policy in the first decade after 9/11 because they were living with war and uncertainty,” said Zegart. She had to push them be more analytical and objective in their class discussions of what a post 9/11 world entailed.

As the years progressed, though, 9/11 increasingly became less personal for the next generation of students. Perceptions began to shift. So much so that Zegart now finds herself in the opposite predicament: How to insert those feelings back in.

“Because they didn’t live through it, they look at it distantly and dispassionately,” Zegart said. “The challenge is, how do you help students better understand the context in which decisions were made and the raw emotion that unavoidably affects how we perceive threats and how we deal with policy responses.”

Teaching the Emotions of the Day

To evoke a visceral response to 9/11, Zegart shows a 4-minute montage of news clips. Students get a sense of how the day unfolded, from the breaking reports of the first tower being struck to a reporter’s on-air reaction as the second plane crashes live into the remaining tower. There are also scenes of people fleeing lower Manhattan amid dust, smoke and debris.

“You just cannot convey that day in a normal lecture or a book,” Zegart said. The video is effective; her students are often left with a sense of the sadness, horror and anguish that defined 9/11.

Zegart then asks her students to imagine they are policymakers at the White House and have to decide what to do next. “We often teach U.S. foreign policymaking as a sterile, Spock-like process where people weigh the pros and cons of options and make dispassionate decisions,” Zegart said. “But human emotion and searing national experiences are important and hard to convey. A key part of understanding history is empathy, and thinking about what it was like to live through something rather than only looking at an event through the distance of time. 9/11 looks inevitable in hindsight, but it was unimaginable on September 10.”

Through the exercise, students get a sense of the urgency that policymakers, like Rice, have to grapple with while making decisions amid a national emergency.

“In retrospect, everything looks quite orderly,” said Rice, who co-taught a class on global risk with Zegart at the Graduate School Business. “It looks like ‘of course that decision led to that decision.’ Political scientists are always talking about the options that were put before the president. That’s not how crisis decision making unfolds. You are dealing with really incomplete information, you are dealing with the need to act now, and you are often reacting from instinct because you don’t have time to think through things.”

Viewing the Attacks from All Sides

When political scientist Lisa Blaydes teaches 9/11 to her students, she tries to give an international perspective of the issues, particularly on how grievances can arise – both legitimately or falsely constructed – in countries abroad and how that can lead to extremism and political violence. For example, in her course Political Science 149: Middle Eastern Politics, several classes are dedicated to examining anti-American attitudes in the Islamic world and the conditions under which individuals become radicalized.

“I try to make sure that students understand both the individual motivations associated with the radicalization of political thought as well as the global context that empowers radicalized individuals to undertake violent action,” said Blaydes, a professor of political science in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a senior fellow at FSI. She asks students to read Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower, which picks up on themes Blaydes covers in the course, particularly those dealing with how authoritarian regimes in the Arab world provided a backdrop for the rise of al-Qaida.

In recent years, Blaydes has found her students showing an increased interest in learning more about radical groups like ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and how they have terrorized communities across the Middle East. “While Sept. 11 made terrorism a salient threat for Americans living in U.S. cities, both terrorism and state-sponsored violence are unfortunately a trauma shared by people around the world,” she said.

Similarly, Crenshaw said, it is important to explain to students the conditions that lead to such extremist views. But, she added, explaining motives should not be mistaken as justifying them. “We are not trying to excuse it; we are trying to understand why something happened,” she said.

With her students, Crenshaw has also looked at how terrorism has been used across history. In the aftermath of 9/11, terrorism almost exclusively became associated with a particular ideology and religion. But there are other examples throughout history of how it has been used as a form of political violence, she said.

“As an instructor, one of my goals was always to show students that 9/11 was something extraordinary, but there are other instances of terrorism and it can be associated with any ideology,” Crenshaw said.

Given its elasticity, terrorism is a confusing and contentious term with no standard definition, Crenshaw said. Thus, as both the term and the acts associated with terrorism have evolved over the past two decades, so has her teaching of it. “The phenomenon that you are trying to teach is changing over time as well, so it’s really a very dynamic subject requiring constant adjustment to take into account the vast outpouring of writing on terrorism but changing terrorism and counterterrorism as well,” she said.

In addition to situating 9/11 against a global and historical backdrop, teaching the attacks also requires a critical look at the domestic challenges that led up to it, including the shortcomings in U.S. intelligence. Zegart assigns students an article she wrote about the failures within the U.S. intelligence communities to adapt to the threat of terrorism, as well as a critique against her piece. “There’s no one perfect view, and if students can realize that their professor is part of an argument and people can disagree, that’s really important,” she said.

Zegart and Crenshaw have also assigned students the 9/11 Commission Report, the official report of the events that led up to the attacks and detailed account of the circumstances surrounding it.

‘Still Hard’

Even though 20 years have passed since 9/11, it does not mean that teaching about the attacks has gotten easier.

“I still have a hard time,” Zegart said. “For years, my screensaver was a picture of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. It was important to me not to forget. I’ve spent my career researching why our intelligence agencies failed to stop 9/11 and how they can better meet threats in the future. I think about that day every day.”

This Q&A with Allen S. Weiner was originally published on the Stanford Law School website.

As the Taliban’s forces closed in on Kabul on Sunday, August 15, 2021, the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani left his country, the acting U.S. ambassador was evacuated, the American flag on the embassy in the country’s capital lowered—and the Biden administration’s plans for an orderly withdrawal of troops, diplomats, and Afghan aids and translators by the anniversary of 9/11 dashed as a scramble for the door becomes more chaotic. After twenty years, 2 trillion dollars, and the lives of almost 2,500 American personnel lost, President Biden said it was time to let the Afghan government and military stand on its own. Here, Stanford Law national security law expert Allen Weiner, who is a research affiliate at FSI’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, discusses the U.S. mission to Afghanistan, its withdrawal, and potential consequences.

What was the American/NATO objective when we invaded Afghanistan almost twenty years ago?

The immediate United States objective at the time of the 2001 invasion was to destroy Al Qaeda’s base of operations in Afghanistan and to kill or capture senior Al Qaeda leaders there.  As those of us who are old enough to remember will recall, the invasion (“Operation Enduring Freedom”) was the U.S.-led response to the 9/11 attacks against World Trade Center twin towers and the Pentagon that were carried out by Al Qaeda. Because the Taliban regime in Afghanistan had a symbiotic relationship with—and provided a safe haven to—Al Qaeda on Afghanistan’s territory, the U.S. and its NATO allies also sought to drive the Taliban from power. At the time, the Taliban was fighting a civil war in Afghanistan and by October 2001 had achieved effective control over most of the country. President Bush and others quickly began to emphasize an additional objective for overthrowing the Taliban— to liberate the Afghan people from the regime’s repressive practices. We sought to promote basic human rights and to end the Taliban’s oppression of women.

Were those objectives met?

The U.S. and its NATO allies largely met those initial goals. Al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan were destroyed, many of its leaders were killed and captured (although some, including Osama bin Laden, managed to escape at least initially), and its ability to plan, finance, and execute major global terrorist operations was severely diminished. U.S. and NATO forces drove the Taliban from power, and after a transitional period, a new government led by Hamid Karzai was established. Women and girls resumed participation in public life in Afghanistan, including education.

But those successes were fleeting?

As we know, the successes did not last. Although Al Qaeda never resumed significant operations in Afghanistan, the organization metastasized, and lethal variants of the organization arose in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, and the Maghreb, among other places. Other terrorist groups, such as the Islamic State and al Shabaab, either grew out of or have affiliations of varying degrees of intensity with Al Qaeda. We have also seen attacks carried out by homegrown terrorist organizations with only loose affiliations to Al Qaeda, sometimes only ideological affinities. So, while Operation Enduring Freedom significantly disrupted terrorist operations originating from Afghanistan, it cannot be said to have eliminated the threat of transnational terrorism.

And the Taliban continued to be a simmering problem in Afghanistan, didn’t it?

The goal of eradicating the Taliban, obviously, also was unmet. Although then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared an end to major combat operations against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in May 2003, a revitalized Taliban renewed an intense civil war in the summer of  2006. That civil war against the Afghanistan government—which appears now to have been won by the Taliban—continued with varying degrees of intensity until the past few days. And if another of the goals of the invasion was to improve the protection of human rights in Afghanistan, we must recognize that civilians suffered terribly during the civil war.

Are there any (hopefully) enduring successes from the twenty-year investment by the U.S. and NATO?

Afghanistan did make significant progress in terms of economic development and the realization of at least some civil and political rights. Per capita GDP rose dramatically in the decades after the U.S. invasion. The status of women and girls improved along many dimensions, including health, life expectancy, education levels, and participation in government institutions. The Taliban’s victory clearly imperils these gains.

The Trump Administration negotiated an agreement with Taliban in 2020 providing for the withdrawal of U.S. Forces from Afghanistan by May 2021, as part of which the Taliban promised not to deliberatively attack U.S. troops during the withdrawal period.  Since then, the Taliban has been steadily gaining control over provinces in the county, and civilian casualties have been rising. Was it pure fantasy that the US was maintaining the peace?

The Trump Administration’s February 2020 agreement with Taliban, in which the U.S. promised to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan in a little over a year, even though the Taliban did not agree to even a ceasefire, much less reach any political agreements with the government about ending the civil war, was the beginning of the end. It clearly signaled to both the Taliban and the government that the U.S. was now concerned only with the security of its own forces, and that the Afghan government was on its own. Given that the Taliban was making progress in gaining territory, at least in the countryside, even with U.S. troops present, many analysts—including the U.S. intelligence community—forecast the eventual overthrow of the Afghan government. It is only the shocking speed with which that happened that is a real surprise.

The fall of the Afghan government has taken many, including apparently some in the Biden administration, by surprise. Why did the collapse of the Afghan military happen so swiftly?  And what role did the Afghan police force and corruption play?

Many commentators who have been critical of the U.S. effort to build up the Afghan military have long expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the Afghanistan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), and many analysts predicted that the Taliban would ultimately prevail against the government after the U.S. and its NATO allies withdrew from Afghanistan. That said, I don’t think anyone predicted it would happen as swiftly as it did.

Multiple factors have been cited to explain how the Taliban—a force estimated to comprise some 75,000 fighters—defeated the 300,000-member strong ANDSF. First, despite the seeming superiority of the government forces, conditions for ANDSF soldiers were quite abysmal. Many reportedly went months without being paid. They lacked ammunition and even food. There are reports of incompetent leadership within the armed forces, leaving Afghan soldiers exposed in the middle of pitch battles, without reinforcements.

A second factor is the pervasive and corrosive corruption among Afghan government actors.  This helps explain why—despite the U.S. infusion of billions of dollars in military assistance— Afghan soldiers went without pay and lacked adequate ammunition.  It also explains why in some cases, after Afghan forces fighting alongside U.S. forces succeeded in clearing territory of Taliban insurgents, the Afghan government would fail to hold it. The notoriously corrupt and unprofessional Afghanistan police forces—who were in charge of security after territory had been cleared of Taliban fighters by the ANDSF—reportedly engaged in predatory practices targeting the local community or could be bought off by the insurgency to cede ground back.

Third, some critics of the U.S. effort to modernize the Afghan army have long argued that the ANDSF lacked resolve to aggressively engage the Taliban insurgency in the absence of active support from U.S. soldiers. Although there are many stories of Afghan soldiers fighting fiercely, there are anecdotal accounts of Afghan armed forces engaging in “mini non-aggression deals” with Taliban fighters in their area of responsibility in an effort to avoid armed engagement.

Fourth, the lack of motivation of Afghan armed forces was exacerbated in recent years by the unpopularity and perceived fecklessness of the Afghan government led by President Ashraf Ghani. Re-elected in 2019 after an election with sharply disputed results, in which voter turnout was less than 20 percent, the Ghani government was widely seen as ineffective in addressing corruption, effectively managing the country, or confronting the growing security threat posed by the Taliban. It became a common refrain among Afghan soldiers that the Ghani government was not one worth fighting for.

Fifth, it appears that in at least some provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban, in essence, offered government forces negotiated settlements to cede control of territory. In some cases, this involved offering payments to government soldiers to switch sides—a particularly attractive offer for soldiers who had not been paid in months. It is likely that the Taliban offered broader commitments, e.g., not to engage in retribution against government soldiers who abandoned the fight, although I have not yet seen reports of such deals.

Sixth, there a seasonal calendar to armed conflict in Afghanistan, and the Taliban has typically engaged in its major military operations during the spring and summer.  Delaying the U.S. withdrawal by six months, so that U.S. forces did not leave during the height of what is known in Afghanistan as “fighting season,” might have given the ANDSF more time to prepare to defend Afghanistan’s cities. Although given how swiftly Afghan government forces were swept aside, this now seems doubtful to me.

Finally, from an operational standpoint, the U.S. has invested billions of dollars in Afghanistan to attempt to build up a military that functions in ways that resemble how a NATO army operates, with air power and advanced weaponry. Such a military depends on extremely complex behind-the-scenes logistics arrangements. In Afghanistan, these logistics systems depended heavily on U.S. contractors, who also began withdrawing from the country after President Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal. Many of the aircraft in Afghanistan’s air force, for instance, were grounded because they lacked parts needed for repairs or routine servicing. One of the lessons of the defeat of the ANDSF is that building a foreign country’s military also requires developing indigenous logistics capacity.

Troops had been drawn down to about 3,000 and negotiations that excluded the Afghan gov’t were conducted with the Taliban during the Trump administration. Could Biden, realistically, have rewound the clock–bringing more troops back? Was Biden pushed into a tough corner?

Although the withdrawal agreement the Trump Administration concluded with the Taliban in February 2020 may not have initiated the death spiral for the Afghanistan government and military, it certainly catalyzed it, as I noted above. It did put the Biden Administration in a tough position; the only option would have been to renege on the agreement, leave U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and to seek to renegotiate the agreement. That said, although that may have been a tough position, it was not an impossible one, as evidenced by the fact that the Biden Administration unilaterally changed the agreed upon date by which U.S. forces would withdraw from Afghanistan from May to August.

I’m not a military strategist, so I can’t say whether maintaining a force of 3,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan would have changed the military situation on the ground. But I think if the U.S. had said that it would not withdraw the U.S. military presence until there was a ceasefire and the Taliban and the Afghan government have negotiated a power sharing agreement/end to the civil war, that might have changed the Taliban’s political assessment about how to proceed. I stress that this only “might” have changed the Taliban’s thinking. The fact that the Taliban has been fighting for twenty years suggests that the group was very determined to regain control of Afghanistan and re-establish its vision of life for the Afghan people.

I understand that Russia and other countries have negotiated agreements to ensure the safety of their embassies and diplomatic staff so that they can continue operations in Kabul. Have the Americans done the same? If not, how significant will that be for the future safety of the U.S and the threat of terrorism? Will we have “eyes on the ground” and intelligence sources?

The United States is currently withdrawing all of its diplomatic personnel from Afghanistan and will presumably once again shutter its embassy in Kabul. The U.S. will face a difficult question about whether to recognize the new Taliban regime that will be installed in Afghanistan, and if so, whether to resume diplomatic relations and re-open its embassy. If the Taliban regime pursues the policies that characterized its period of rule in the late 1990s, particularly the severe repression of women and girls, I doubt the U.S. will re-establish relations. Even if the U.S. did re-establish diplomatic relations, it is inconceivable that the Taliban would permit the United States to maintain the large intelligence and security presence we have had in Afghanistan over the past two decades. So, we will not have the ability gather intelligence on the ground or to conduct military operations against any terrorist threats that emerge in Afghanistan.

The Taliban has pledged that it will not allow Afghanistan’s territory to be used by terrorist groups that seek to conduct hostile operations against foreign countries. Although the Taliban learned in 2001 about the potential costs to it of harboring such groups on Afghanistan’s territory—namely, being overthrown by the U.S. and its NATO allies—there are obviously reasons to question the Taliban’s promise.

Is there anything Biden can do now to minimize the damage?

The Biden administration does not have much leverage at this point. The administration will presumably signal to the Taliban that it will closely monitor its conduct with respect to preventing its territory from being used by terrorist groups and its performance on human rights issues, including the treatment of women and girls. Should the Taliban perform poorly on these issues, the U.S. could try to secure sanctions against the Taliban regime through the Security Council; after all, the Council had imposed sanctions on the Taliban in the 1990s in response to its providing a safe haven to Osama bin Laden and its violation of human rights, particularly discrimination against women and girls. Today, however, it is unclear whether Russia and China, which are likely to seek stable relations with the Taliban government, would support such sanctions. That means the U.S. would probably be limited to unilateral sanctions as a way of signaling disapproval of, and seeking to change the behavior of, a prospective Taliban government.

Watch the video of Larry Diamond analyzing the latest intelligence sharing events for Democracy Now. 

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, in their New York Times column Interpreter from October 8, are exploring the idea that the United States of America are in a moral position to address the state of democracy in the world. CDDRL Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama said this began with America’s founding fathers, who “had this idea that the success of democracy in the world would depend on its success here.” Read the whole article here.