Quotes from Peter Bergen

Mattis has been sharply critical of President Barack Obama's policies on Iran and Obama's capping of troop numbers and campaign end-dates in theaters of war such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Mattis also appears to be a skeptic of the Obama-era policy of putting women into combat roles.

Since Trump is not quick to forgive the merest of slights, it's hard to imagine him calling on any of the officials who have publicly taken a stand against him to serve in key national security slots.

Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts, and simple common sense.

Afghanistan's winters in the north are legendarily harsh, and southern Afghanistan, by contrast, is bleak desert. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that Afghanistan is one of the world's most heavily mined countries.

Keeping a relatively small, predominantly U.S. Special Forces presence in Afghanistan to continue to train the Afghan army past December 2016 is a wise policy that would benefit both Afghans and Americans.

There is no hint that Trump wishes to engage in or to foment violence against the enemies, such as immigrants, he has identified as undermining the American way of life.

If the party of Lincoln wishes to become the party of intolerance, selecting Trump to be its presidential candidate is a good way forward.

One only has to look at the debacle that has unfolded in Iraq after the withdrawal of U.S. troops at the end of 2011 to have a sneak preview of what could take place in an Afghanistan without some kind of residual American presence.

An intelligence officer and historian, Rayburn published a 2014 book, 'Iraq After America,' which is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Iraq descended into chaos in the years after the American troop withdrawal at the end of 2011.

A key flaw of the Obama administration's approach to Afghanistan has been constantly announcing proposed withdrawal dates for U.S. forces, which has enabled the Taliban to believe they can simply wait out the clock.

The documentary feature film 'Legion of Brothers' tells the stories of the handful of U.S. Special Forces soldiers who, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, went into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and, within a matter of weeks, overthrew the Taliban regime.

While the story about the hunt for bin Laden has been exhaustively reported and the key sources and witnesses are in agreement about the main points of the narrative, of course, it's still possible that we could learn new details about the story that would add to the narrative.

And in the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound surrounded by his wives and children and far from the front lines of his holy war.

It's much harder to detect a lone wolf than it is somebody who's associated with a larger organization who's having planning meetings and making phone calls to people in the organization. And so that is really how the jihad has really developed in the United States.

Some might say that that while al Qaeda the organization may be basically dead, its ideology continues to thrive and to inspire 'lone wolves' to attack the United States.

One of the themes of 'The Longest War,' my book, which came out before the Arab spring happened, was how al-Qaida and bin Laden was losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world, not because the United States was winning them, but because al-Qaida was simply losing them.

Will there be a political backlash against British Prime Minister Theresa May, whose ruling Conservative Party is traditionally seen as 'stronger' on terrorism than its main rival, the Labour Party?

So Pakistan is a country that I'm very fond of and have spent a lot of time, but it is a country where conspiracy theories have a life of their own.

Bush administration officials, of course, deny that they didn't take the threat urgently enough, but there is no debating that in their public utterances, private meetings, and actions, the al Qaeda threat barely registered.

A decade and a half ago, the U.S. Air Force dropped massive 15,000-pound 'Daisy Cutter' bombs on the Tora Bora complex where Osama bin Laden was hiding in December 2001.

Contrary to what the Americans frequently reiterated, al-Qaeda did not have any relationship with Saddam Hussein or his regime.

When news of the first plane's hitting the World Trade Center reached them, bin Laden's followers exploded with joy. But shrewder members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan realized that the attacks might not be the stunning victory that bin Laden, and many in the West, took them to be.

The Japanese scored an important victory at Pearl Harbor, but the attack pulled the United States into World War II, and four years later, Japan was in ruins, utterly defeated.

Trump has claimed he knows more about ISIS than America's leading generals. Clearly, this is also total nonsense; he doesn't seem to have done the slightest thing to educate himself about ISIS.