The speakers, national security journalist Peter Bergen, Editor in Chief of Foreign Policy magazine Susan Glasser, and president of NAF Steve Coll, rarely disagreed on each other’s takeaways, often adding personal anecdotes of interviews with prominent foreign leaders whose input fell on deaf ears.

Questionable Military Tactics

Glasser told the audience she spoke to General Boris Gromov, the commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan at the time of the 1989 pullout, who told her days after the Twin Towers fell, an American foot presence in Afghanistan would be a disaster.

For Coll, whose book on the subject, Ghost Wars, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005, the wrong lessons were learned from previous Soviet and British campaigns in the country and elsewhere.

While admitting the “thought experiment” in Afghanistan was skewed by the Iraq war, Coll explained the diagnosis of mistakes NATO and the U.S. made were not those of the USSR. “The latter had a much more illegitimate cause,” he said. “The U.S. revolt (by the Afghans) took much longer,” he added, and required “many more mistakes and more years to unfold.”

The speakers explained the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in the early days was designed to minimize the visibility of ground forces. Glasser remarked he didn’t see an American soldier until 2002, some three months after Operation Enduring Freedom commenced. Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst and director of NAF’s National Security Studies Program, shared an exchange he had with a senior commander. Bergen asked why the 10th Mountain Division — a light-infantry unit with specialized training to fight in harsh terrain — wasn’t called in to join the assault on Tora Bora, a decision Glasser wrote in an essay was one of the worst decisions of the decade. Bergen says the commander “feared, on basis of advice, if he put men there, it would provoke a Pashtun uprising,” a reality the three panelists say the U.S. wasn’t prepared to face.

The footprint of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was so light, the panel maintained, that more journalists were killed than soldiers in the opening months of the conflict.

Role of Pakistan

The panelists agreed the Bush administration erred in outsourcing the security and political apparatus to then-President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, a move done to focus personnel and resources on the imminent war in Iraq. Coll points the finger at the lack of South Asian experts on the Bush staff, arguing Bush’s advisors were too credulous of Pakistan, and took for granted the Asian country’s interest’s aligned with America’s. Coll, mirroring Glasser’s analysis, said, “It didn’t require deep investigation to see the duality in how Pakistan managed its relationship with the U.S.”

What frustrated the panelists most about the U.S. pullback in the country was the willingness of Taliban officials to integrate themselves in the new pro-U.S. Karzai government, and the missed opportunity of securing the trust and stability of regional leaders.

Coll recounted a meeting replayed to him of Taliban regional leaders gathering a few weeks before Karzai formally took over. After the leaders discussed surrender policy and securing their role in the new government, one member asked if they would still receive car allowances. To Coll, that anecdote plays to the ease with which rival factions in the war-torn country shift allegiances.

But what should have been an easy and nation-building transition was sundered by what Coll says was a U.S. policy of giving rein to “proxy warlords.” He says Bush Afghan policy made the U.S. “a bunch of warlords,” selling local and regional Taliban leaders to bounty under the assumption all Taliban members were in toe with the group’s senior members.

Glasser said Pakistan continued to play both sides, something obvious to journalists and senior policy makers. She brought up an observation that hundreds of Pakistani families living outside of Islamabad were sending their sons off to war in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion, their return facilitated by the Pakistani government.

Hitting upon a theme used throughout the 90-minute discussion, Coll said, the “problem, even today, is that we overlearned the lesson. Being shocked by our inability to see what was obvious, we’re becoming firm in the other direction.”

To Bergen, the Bush administration’s reliance on Musharraf smacked of wishful thinking. He explains the U.S. approval rating in Pakistan is 12 percent, down from the higher teens earlier in the decade. Bergen mocked the notion held by Bush officials that Pakistan would understand its real strategic interests and curry favor with the U.S. Alluding to the country’s conflicts with India, he said, “If we lost 3.5 wars with Canada over 60 years, we’ll have a different focus.”

How important was 9/11, anyway?

Coll and Glasser proposed 9/11 was a false ground-zero to the international developments most important to U.S. strategic interests. Coll, after describing an essay that appeared in the Financial Times, portrayed the events of September 11th as a “side-bar” to the economic expansion of China and Brazil, and the economic crises of the last three years.

Glasser referred to a spread in Foreign Policy that identified events following 9/11 that were more impactful domestically and abroad than the terrorist attacks. Social networking appeared on the list, as did the fastest transition from poverty to the middle class in the last ten years the world has ever experienced, she said.

Coll and Glasser considered whether the military expeditions in Asia were a “late-imperial overstretch,” rather than a response to terrorism. In terms of path dependencies, the two proffered whether the military build-up in Afghanistan occurred independent of 9/11 and proposed that 50 years from now, history books could view the last decade that way.

Why the wars happened

Coll explained 9/11 provoked extension “of what was building up anyway.” He asked whether the war in Iraq  was instigated by 9/11, or was it inevitable the U.S. and Tony Blair of Great Britain would over-interpret their international role given Saddam Hussein’s UN violations.

For the panelists, that over-interpretation was premised on how speedy and cost-effective previous U.S. and British military engagements were following the collapse of the USSR. The budgets that dramatically undershot the massive debts the U.S. would incur were a manifestation of the luck the two powers had. Coll pointed to the quick and successful intervention in Bosnia, the bombing of Serbia, the first Gulf War and UK engagement in Sierra Leone as motivation for entering Iraq regardless of its 9/11 culpability. “That’s the overstretch, that basically success of the Gulf War (and other victorious conflicts) was so rapidly over-learned,” Coll said.

Bergen was uneasy putting so much stock into the US-led conflicts. He said the war in Afghanistan costs 1 percent of U.S. GDP, compared to the 9 percent Vietnam commanded. And while that conflict spelled significant political unrest domestically, the current military expedition is on the back of the minds of most Americans. He summarized the decade since 9/11 as a time of relative peace and limited economic wealth.

Now the whole sorry episode has ended with Sheehan’s apology. The BBC reports:

[I]n an e-mail to Gen Breemen released by the Dutch defence ministry, Gen Sheehan said: “I am sorry that my recent public recollection of those discussions of 15 years ago inaccurately reflected your thinking on some specific social issues in the military.”

He added: “To be clear, the failure on the ground in Srebrenica was in no way the fault of the individual soldiers.”

While former Bush administration lawyers might argue his treatment wasn’t actually torture, Boumediene — an Algerian working for the Red Crescent in Bosnia where he lived with his wife and two daughters when he was arrested in 2001 — was unequivocal. “I don’t think,” he said when asked if it was torture. “I’m sure.”

The United States responded to ABC that it’s not U.S. policy to torture prisoners. But the Boumediene case cries out for not just an investigation, but prosecution and accountability for those responsible — as well ascompensation for the victims of U.S. abuse.

Boumediene is just one of about 700 men swept up by the U.S. military after Sept. 11, 2001 based on little or no evidence. Originally arrested by Bosnian police in October 2001, he was charged with conspiracy to blow up the U.S. and British embassies in that country. When the Bosnians found no evidence to support the charges — charges Boumediene consistently vehemently denied — the charges were dropped.

But the Bush administration pressured the Bosnian government not to release him, and instead to turn him over to the U.S. military, which sent him to Guantanamo Bay.

As ABC News recounts, two weeks later, President Bush boasted Boumediene’s arrest as a victory in his “war on terror.”

“Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy,” Bush said in his address.

In fact, as ABC notes, officials of the Bush administration have never provided any credible evidence to support that charge.

Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, contrary to the Bush administration’s claims, Boumediene and his fellow Gitmo prisoners had the right to challenge their indefinite detention by the government. In November, a federal judge ordered Boumediene’s release. Still, the U.S. government insisted he could not be released within the United States, and it wasn’t until France agreed to accept Boumediene in April that he was able to be freed.

Despite Boumediene’s seven and half year ordeal, he is, in a sense, one of the lucky ones. Another 240 men remain at Guantanamo Bay, most of whom have not yet had the same opportunity to defend themselves. About 60 have already been cleared of wrongdoing and approved for release, yet the United States refuses to accept them and can’t seem to negotiate their transfer anywhere else, either, given that the United States has branded them terrorists.

Not surprisingly, Boumediene told ABC News that he’s considering bringing a lawsuit against former Bush administration officials seeking compensation for his wrongful imprisonment and abuse.

“I cry, just I cry,” he told ABC News, because after seven years in the Guantanamo prison, “I don’t know my daughters.”

Update: Kudos to reader json, who points out that Dan Rather interviewed Boumediene last week — which would appear to undermine ABC’s claim of exclusivity…

Following closed-door hearings in which the Dept. of Justice presented its full justification for holding the five Algerian men, detained in Bosnia in 2001 and held in Guantanamo Bay for the last seven years, Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in Washington ruled that the government had presented insufficient evidence to continue holding the men. (He did allow them to continue holding one other prisoner about whom the DOJ also presented evidence.)

Included among the men freed was Lakhdar Boumediene, the subject of the landmark case, Boumediene v. Bush, which established their right to habeas corpus proceedings.

The Times also notes, however, that the men aren’t likely to be immediately let go, either; Dept. of Justice lawyers are expected to appeal.

In a statement issued this afternoon, the DOJ said that while it was pleased it was permitted to hold onto one of the detainees, “we are . . . disappointed by, and disagree with, the Court’s decision that we did not carry our burden of proof with respect to the other detainees.”

The DOJ added: “we are promptly reviewing the decision with respect to the other five petitioners. But we also think that this ruling demonstrates the need for Congress to enact procedures that allow these petitions to be adjudicated in a way that is fair to the detainee but that allows the Government to present its case without imperiling national security.”

The Judge in the case, however, Judge Richard Leon, in an unusual statement actually asked the government not to appeal the ruling, saying that, as reported on SCOTUS blog: “seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer to their legal question is enough.”

The DOJ has been working hard in recent weeks to keep the habeas corpus cases filed by hundreds of detainees from moving forward, even though the Supreme Court ruled in the Boumediene case in June that they’re entitled to challenge their detention. On Tuesday, Justice Dept. lawyers filed an opposition to an order by another federal district court judge handling the cases of more than 100 Guantanamo detainees. The judge had ordered the government to turn over the legal and factual basis for holding the men, and all exculpatory evidence.

On Tuesday, the government opposed the judge’s order. In an e-mail sent to lawyers handling the cases last week, the government lawyers had called the court’s order to turn over evidence “legally inappropriate and unworkable.”