In a conversation led by former AT&T CEO and OU alumnus Randall Stephenson, award-winning journalist David Sanger discussed Afghanistan and cyber security during the Presidential Speakers Series dinner on Thursday evening in the Oklahoma Memorial Union.
A three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Sanger served as a national security correspondent at The New York Times for nearly four decades. The Harvard College graduate has authored two books pertaining to U.S. foreign policy, including: “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power,” which revolves around conflicts in Iran and North Korea alongside China’s rise to power, and “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” which focuses on cyber weapons that arose during former President Barack Obama’s administration.
The conversation began with Stephenson citing Sanger’s background in Afghanistan as he began reporting on the country following the terrorist act of September 11, 2001 during former President George W. Bush’s administration. Sanger pointed toward the great amount of American interest in the country and said he recalls the reasoning behind U.S. entry and why they remained there.
“It started with the best of intentions, of course,” Sanger said. “Then we wanted to go in to bring in democracy. … Democracy is a wonderful domestic product, but it’s a really crummy export because you can’t impose it on people, and we started exporting.”
Sanger said once the U.S. decided to try and build up the nation of Afghanistan, it became harder for them to leave the country. Intelligence agencies overestimated the extent of how much the Afghans would fight for their country and underestimated the strength of the Taliban, leading to its recent takeover of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
“I’m not suggesting for a minute that we shouldn’t have gone in after Al Qaeda, but one of the long-term costs was that we lost our focus on the existential issues that today make up the keys of our foreign policy,” Sanger said. “We lost our focus on China. We didn’t understand until too late the key role of remaining technologically competitive.”
On the topic of cyber security, Stephenson drew attention to one of the topics Sanger discussed in his book “Confront and Conceal,” which was a series of secret attacks ordered by Obama, known as Operation Olympic Games.
The operation was one of the first known uses of cyber weapons. It was a joint effort between the U.S. and Israel and their mission was to slip computer code programmed to explode by either slowing down or speeding up nuclear centrifuges built by Iran in the city of Natanz.
Sanger said cyber war and conflict no longer live separately from traditional war and conflict, comparing the effects of cyber conflict today to the impact of the addition of airplanes in war.
“When the airplane was new, people wrote books about how there would be air wars and then ground wars, but then by World War II we got a combined war, and that’s where we’re headed with cyber,” Sanger said.
Sanger also discussed the influence of China, citing the country as a military, economic and technological competitor. With a more powerful and faster 5G network, Americans feared China could be listening in on private conversations in hopes of gaining intel. Sanger argued against this by saying the country isn’t interested in personal conversations, and if they were, they could already do that before a 5G network.
“The reason it’s significant is that whoever controls your network not only can monitor it during peacetime, they can turn it off during wartime,” Sanger said. “You don’t want to suddenly discover that the communications network on which you enter economy, emergency services and military communications run is actually controlled out of Beijing.”
Sanger said the difference in news reach from when he first started writing for The New York Times is that the paper went from 1.5 million subscribers for the Sunday issue to 7.5 million digital subscribers. He praised the ability for great journalism to be just a tap away, but also pointed out that biased journalism rose along with this.
“We got Fox News telling people on the right what they want to hear, and we got MSNBC telling people on the left what they wanted to hear,” Sanger said. “Today, people actually believe they are entitled to their own facts.”
The first amendment and its uniqueness to the U.S. democracy has become more valuable in current times after the term “fake news” rose to popularity during former President Donald Trump’s administration, Sanger said.
“In the past four years we have learned the brilliance of the founders in declaring that the government of the (U.S.) cannot mandate what appears in a free press,” Sanger said. “We came really close, really, really close to a disaster for our democracy that I think was fundamentally saved by the structure the founders put together.”
