"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 9

Episode 9: Does Anything Scare War Correspondent Clarissa Ward?

CNN’s chief international correspondent has seen the worst of humanity. But she’s also experienced amazing acts of kindness under some of the most difficult circumstances. And she’s learned a lot about what drives countries into war in the first place.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Clarissa Ward: [RECORDING A VOICE NOTE] I am now on my way to Heathrow Airport heading to Ukraine. It's about 5:45 in the morning, so I'm a little groggy and as always with these trips, feeling excited about the work, but a little bit anxious and sad, leaving my kids, especially this time. I only had a couple of days at home.

Clarissa Ward, CNN's chief international correspondent, has covered all sorts of wars and conflicts.

Clarissa Ward: Iraq. Afghanistan, the Russian incursion into Georgia, Syria, of course. I covered Yemen, Ukraine.

So many, it can be easy to leave one off the list.

Clarissa Ward: Those are the ones that pop into my head immediately, but I feel like maybe there are others as well that I'm missing.

She's right.

She's also reported on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. And the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: It's bombardment like that that has left Aleppo a virtual ghost town.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Clarissa Ward and others were stopped at a checkpoint after new fighting broke out this morning.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: Yemen is unraveling. In the North airstrikes pound…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: I do want to go now live to the airport where Clarissa Ward is, uh, there with the live report…

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: Taliban fighters have flooded the capitol, smiling and victorious.They took this city of 6 million people in a matter of hours, barely firing a shot.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: We are in the heart of rebel held Syria, and this entire area has seen some of the most intensive bombardment…

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: …Clarissa Ward, CNN, Lahij Province, Yemen

She'll tell you that witnessing so much violence and so much trauma will eventually catch up with you.

And that she's seen the absolute worst of humanity.

Clarissa Ward: But I also see the best of humanity. And those moments don't usually make it onto the primetime news.

Peter Bergen: And these exceptional examples of humanity that you've mentioned, is there one that comes to mind?

Clarissa Ward: They're not usually the grand acts of heroism that we see in the movies. They're little gestures. A woman braiding her daughter's hair after being up all night listening to bombing and shelling, or my driver Ayman who drove with me to the front lines in Aleppo back in 2012, and the bombardment was relentless and there were snipers.I was so frightened I could barely function.

And Ayman could see that I was just so crippled by my fear and I just never forget. He took out a bar of chocolate and offered me a piece of chocolate and started talking to me about Russia. He had lived in Russia for years and I just remember feeling so grateful that through his sensitivity and this small act of giving me a piece of chocolate and talking to me about something that wasn't related to the chaos around us, which allowed me to distract myself for just a moment and feel safe for just a moment.

I'm often concerned about people who don't get afraid because the reality is that fear is hugely important and instructive. And, um, there's a reason we feel frightened as humans. It's, uh, our bodies and brains and wisdom passed through the ages telling us to get out of a given situation. The thing that you learn to do with time is to control your fear, not to let it sit in the driver's seat, not to let panic take over you in any given situation. You don't let it call the shots.

I'm Peter Bergen. Welcome to In The Room.

Up next, my CNN colleague, war reporter Clarissa Ward explains why she does what she does,what she's learned from being on so many frontlines, how wars are fought and rarely won.

Clarissa Ward: I think it was President Obama who says, you know, you do a full scale invasion. It's a giant disaster. You do, a sort of more tactical incursion, it's a giant disaster. You do nothing, it's a giant disaster.

And why centering stories about war on people is the only way she knows how to make a difference.

[MUSIC BRIEFLY INTENSIFIES]

Clarissa Ward grew up between the United States and the UK.

Clarissa Ward: My mother is American. My father is British. I was born here in London, but I moved to the U.S. when I was two and then I moved back to the UK when I was eight, and then I moved back to the U.S. when I was 18.

So she developed a certain ease moving between different countries from a young age. She's described it as being comfortable everywhere, but not quite belonging anywhere.

In 2001, when she was a senior at Yale University, studying comparative literature and devouring Russian novels, 9/11 happened.

Clarissa Ward: I realized that I had been so oblivious and disengaged and self-absorbed and I felt a profound sense of shame that I had been living in a bubble and I also felt this was my eureka moment.

And while she had no idea how she was going to do it, she was certain she had a calling. Journalism. But that word doesn’t quite capture it.

Clarissa Ward: I wanted to dedicate my life to being a translator between worlds and trying to better understand the dehumanization and miscommunication that I felt was in some part responsible for this hideous act, but also understanding better that there was a chasm between how America saw its role in the world and how others in the world saw America's role in the world.

Peter Bergen: You used the noun, you wanted to be a translator and, and you speak quite a number of languages. What are they?

Clarissa Ward: Well, I speak a number of languages at varying levels. So I speak French and Italian well. I speak Russian and Arabic conversationally. I speak Spanish conversationally and I speak basic Mandarin.

Her first conflict assignment was in Baghdad, as a producer for Fox News in 2005. She’d never been to a war zone, but despite the risks that come with this sort of job, she was eager to go.

Clarissa Ward: We have a tendency often to fetishize the work of war correspondents and make it seem like it's nonstop swashbuckling adventures in hostile lands. And the reality is a big part of what we do is quite mundane. There is a lot of driving, there is a lot of waiting around. There is a lot of desperately trying to find great local producers. And then there's also, with television especially, a lot of making sure you have enough power that you can charge all of your equipment, that your car has enough gas, that you have enough food and so on and so forth.

It's also a lot of very long days, without sleep, without proper meals.

Clarissa Ward: [RECORDING A VOICE NOTE] It’s February 25th, and I usually try to get up for breakfast because it's always the most important meal, especially when you're on the road, but it just hasn't been possible with these late nights. So I have been eating lots and lots of peanuts from my mini bar, which I guess are a good source of protein, but probably not particularly nourishing, but whatever works.

[MUSIC SHIFTS, DROPS]

Clarissa Ward: Sometimes you don't even want to sit down for a proper meal because that might make you wanna have a nap and that's probably a luxury you don't really have other than occasionally napping in the car. But for me, genuinely, a big part of what keeps me going is I really love hearing people's stories. Because my goal is not just to tell people what's going on. My goal is for people around the world in different places to genuinely feel connected and engaged on a human level, which requires, I think, finding empathy, finding common ground.

That is what Clarissa tried to do with her reporting on the Syrian Civil War, especially after the Russians stepped in in 2015 to prop up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: After months and months of thousands of Russian bombs raining down on here the streets are largely deserted and the very few residents who are still here who we've spoken to, have told us that they don't expect the situation to get any better. In fact…

It’s a war that continues to this day. The United Nations estimates that more than 300,000 people have been killed and more than 12 million people have been forced to leave their homes.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: In fact, they're convinced it will only get worse.

A brutal war, where the Assad regime has been accused of committing war crimes-including the relentless aerial bombing of the densely populated city of Aleppo.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: We are in the heart of rebel-held Syria, and this entire area has seen some of the most intensive bombardment in the past few months,

A war where hospitals have been targeted. And chemical weapons have been used against civilians, including children.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: We've been traveling all around here for nearly a week now.

Clarissa says one of the ways she tries to engage policymakers and get the public to care about conflicts that can seem really far away is by telling the stories of people she meets.

Like a tailor, whose son was killed in Syria while he attended a protest against the Assad regime.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: This man told us his 21 year old son was shot by security forces while attending a demonstration.

Clarissa Ward: I started to ask him about his son and what had happened. You know, there is this conflict as a journalist where you know that in order to get the most profound material, you do need to push a little harder and dig a little deeper.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: Despite the risks, he took his son to a government hospital. They didn't even let us in, he told us. They said they wouldn't take injured civilians.

Clarissa Ward: That can sometimes mean putting people through pain as they recollect something devastating. But the journalist in you is saying, I just need to sit silently and let this moment play out, even though it feels agonizing. And, and sure enough, this man continued talking and he broke down and I let him weep. And just sat there and it was intensely emotional and hard.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: He says his son bled to death. He was just a normal young man, very quiet, very obedient. He was very loved.

Clarissa Ward: But I really felt that for people watching that they could really connect to this man. It's one of those cliches of war that it's the ordinary people who bear the brunt, and whether that's civilians and frankly whether that's the grunts on the front lines. The ones who sit in positions of power are often making their decisions without having a full sense of what that loss really looks like or feels like, and where things are going wrong, where the breakdowns are.

For me, the most, sort of, concerning component of that is when you feel like there is a real gap between policy and humanity. And obviously by necessity policymakers cannot just rely on emotion and humanity and that type of thinking in order to make very difficult decisions. But I still feel strongly that it needs to be part of the conversation.

And if you strip away. That human component of war, and you're just left with this sort of bare bones and the geopolitics and the strategy and the tactics, I think you're doing a real disservice to, to the people who are fighting, the people who are dying, the people who are caught in the middle of it. And that's been a sort of guiding light with my own reporting is putting people at the front of the story and not as the, kind of, back half of the story.

Peter Bergen: And yet despite all the great coverage you did and some other journalists Assad seems to have won the war.

Clarissa Ward: He does. And that is really hard to get your head around and really challenges all the preconceptions that so many of us have about why we do this and what the end goal is and whether we can make a difference. And Syria was, for me, the conflict where I had this ultimately liberating epiphany where I understood that like, my job is not to stop the bloodshed or end the war. My job is to put a spotlight on it, to expose it, to hold people in power accountable. But it's not my responsibility to have that kind of an impact on policy.

Peter Bergen: But you were asked to speak at the United Nations about what was going on in Aleppo, in Syria in 2016. How did that come down?

Clarissa Ward: It was an invitation that I received through the office of Samantha Power, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to the UN. And I, of course, said that I would be privileged to have the opportunity. I don't think I really understood exactly what it entailed to be able to sit there in that room and say my piece based on what I had observed covering this war for at that time five years and talking about the ways in which we had let the Syrian people down and, and looking at the Russian ambassador turning purple as he watched me speak.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: There is no trust. No trust in the Assad regime, no trust in ceasefires or cessation of hostilities or humanitarian corridors. No trust in the Russians. And no trust in you. By the way, in us in the international community who have been wringing their hands on the sidelines, while hospitals and bakeries and schools have been bombed, while phosphorous and cluster bombs have killed countless civilians.

Clarissa Ward: It was satisfying, it was cathartic.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: I have been to Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, and every terrible conflict that you can think of, I have never seen anything on the scale of Aleppo. There are no winners in Aleppo.

Clarissa Ward: It probably crossed a line in some ways, a little bit, in terms of blurring journalism versus activism, but in that moment, I really didn't care. And if I'm being totally honest, I still don't care. It's a proud moment for me. Do I think it made any difference? Do I think it changed anything? No, but it felt really good.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

After covering the conflict in Syria for many years, Clarissa then headed to Afghanistan where she embedded with the Taliban. It was about a year and a half before the Taliban took over the country in the summer of 2021.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: We’re heading out now to meet up with our Taliban escorts. There are no Western journalists in the areas we’re headed to.

Clarissa says she had little idea the Taliban would be back in power so quickly.

Clarissa Ward: It was clear that it was something extraordinary that for nearly 20 years at that time, they had been able to survive, basically fighting with AK-47s and flip flops against the world's most sophisticated military. And we experienced some of that. We would see U.S. helicopters in the sky and be filled with this sense of sickening dread because obviously when you're traveling with a convoy of Taliban fighters and you see U.S. planes, your fear is that you're, you're gonna get bombed.

But they had a tenacity, an undeniable tenacity, partly as a result of their faith and their vision of Islam which dictates that it's really all about the afterlife and this present life is less important and doesn't matter, which made them very effective as warriors and has made them very ineffective, I think, as political leaders.

Peter Bergen: This was at a time when they'd already kidnapped journalists and killed some journalists. They routinely were kidnapping Americans. This seems like a pretty risky endeavor.

Clarissa Ward: It was definitely harder to persuade CNN than it was to persuade the Taliban. I think what clinched it was the fact that the peace talks were already ongoing and the Taliban had a lot of momentum and Donald Trump, the president at the time, had made it clear that he wanted to get out.

And so the Taliban wanted to do whatever they needed to do to make it happen. And I think they understood that what they needed to do was work on their PR a little bit and start letting journalists in and try to show a different face as it were. But what I was really struck by, spending time with them, was when you had a substantive conversation about the ideology, it was clear that none of it had changed. There was no fundamental shift. There was no Taliban 2.0. That was sort of a myth, that evolved out of, well, partially out of their own proclamations, partially probably out of some wishful thinking.

But the nature of the supreme leader's leadership is such that he does not want to invite any opportunity for factionalization. And so his approach is until we can achieve internal consensus we err on the side of being more conservative rather than trying to push forward issues such as girls' education and risk having offshoots.

Peter Bergen: And then of course you were in Kabul, Afghanistan when the Taliban took over.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: This is a sight I honestly thought I would never see. Scores of Taliban fighters and just behind us, the U.S. Embassy compound. Some carry American weapons. They tell us they're here to maintain law and order.

Peter Bergen: And then you also had a rather dramatic exit.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward:: What's your message to America right now?

(Clarissa Ward translating as Taliban fighter responds to her question): America already spent enough time in Afghanistan. They need to leave, he tells us.

Clarissa Ward: U.S. forces were obviously, precipitating the final withdrawal, if you will. And so there was this kind of limited window, that we had to exit because if you didn't get into the airport, then you weren't going to be able to get out or, or where we weren't sure how you would be able to get out or if you would be able to get out.

But day by day it was becoming much harder to get out at the airport. So we spoke to some British Special Forces contacts through one of our security consultants, and they instructed us to come to a specific gate, at a specific time, on a specific day. And we had hoped, because it was very early in the morning, it was six in the morning that we would be one of the only people, it was more of a door than a gate that knew about this entrance. And we would be quickly let in and, and that would be that. Of course we got there and there were hundreds of people there.

And so then you had this really awful situation where we tried to push our way in and the British soldiers came out and physically pulled us in, which is something that will honestly stay with me for a very long time because I don't think you ever really get over the randomness of how one passport affords you the opportunity to leave and another passport consigns you to misery and destruction.

Peter Bergen: How did you feel when you got on the plane and it, it started taking off from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan?

Clarissa Ward: To be honest, I think mostly I was just thinking about whether it was a mistake to have left. I still think about that.

Not long after that, she headed to cover the war in Ukraine. She said goodbye to her husband and her two young kids. On her most recent trip there, she also happened to be pregnant with her third child.

Clarissa Ward: [RECORDING A VOICE NOTE] It’s February 21st. I'm feeling a little wrecked. Uh, we were up until five in the morning yesterday, uh, because of Biden's surprise visit to Kyiv. And then we've been live all day today. And we're gonna be up again until four in the morning tonight.

And, uh, it is tricky, uh, sometimes, especially if I'm being honest, when you're pregnant because you get so tired and a little hormonal, but you never want to make it seem like you're any less able to do anything than anybody else just because you're pregnant. So, yeah, I guess I'm just feeling it a little more than usual at the moment. But that is not important, um, and certainly does not compare to what people in Ukraine are dealing with. So forgive that momentary self-indulgence.

The fact that she was pregnant in a war zone made quite a few headlines. She was featured in People magazine, in the Spanish press, and was all over the news in Italy.

Clarissa Ward: It was funny because People magazine had just posted this short article about how I was expecting my third child, and there was a picture of me standing in Kharkiv and I was pregnant and I didn't even say anything about it. And then suddenly it became front page news.

I also understand that if you haven't spent a lot of time in war zones, it's very easy to get the wrong idea and think that I'm running around with a bulletproof vest and putting my life in danger and putting my child's life in danger when the reality, if you have a better sense of the lay of the land, you understand that war zones are not monoliths.

There are parts of them that are very dangerous and there are often parts where life seems fairly normal, which is certainly true of Kyiv. It's not completely normal. I don't wanna downplay it, but you have to make a reservation to get a seat in a restaurant on a Saturday night as well, so life does go on.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward:  On most days Alegrev Noy sets out before dawn, part of a volunteer group called Bulldozer that transports the remains of Ukraine's fallen soldiers back to their families.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward:  It’s February 17th and we have spent the last two days driving around with a volunteer who picks up the dead Ukrainian soldiers who are delivered to various morgues and then repatriates their remains to the villages and towns where they're from.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: So why do you do this work? Few people are willing to do this work for free, he says, and not everyone has the psyche for it.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward:  So it's been a pretty somber couple of days and draining but mostly it's been a couple of days where I think you really take stock of the scale of the loss here and it's hard to get your head around, but the last couple of days has sort of made it clear just how great the tragedy really is.

Peter Bergen: You lived in Russia. Are you surprised by how poorly in general the Russians have performed in Ukraine?

Clarissa Ward: I have been less surprised because, talking to my contacts in Russia, it was clear to me that the pervasive corruption that exists spread well beyond government. And so I had already a strong sense that within the Department of Defense, within the military, that rampant corruption existed. The other thing that I had heard from some pretty good sources was that they tried to replicate the model that they used with the annexation of Crimea, whereby they paid off a lot of people in advance and strategically went to each region, spoke to those who were more or less friendly to the Russians, and gave them a lot of money to “do the right thing,” so to speak, when the invasion began.

Unlike Crimea, where everyone took their money and did what they were told, when the full scale invasion of Ukraine began, it was only some of the leadership in Kherson in the South that went along with the plan. Everybody else just decided, yeah, I'm actually gonna keep your money and we're gonna fight you. Which I think they have been woefully unprepared for because money talks and especially in Russia, you wanna get things done. You pay bribes and when you pay bribes, doors open and things happen. So I think that they were genuinely taken aback by that.

Peter Bergen: You know, the Russian Federation is obviously much bigger with much more resources than Ukraine, which is not a small country. But if you just do the math and you think about a war that could carry on for many years. With all the faults the Russians have in terms of tactics, their strategic design, the conscripts they have, the bad battle tactics, everything you know, how does this end, and it's a hard question. I know, but, but how, how do you see this playing out?

Clarissa Ward: So my fear is that it's going to devolve into a protracted war of attrition, which is sort of what we've already started to see. What I think is interesting and frankly a little concerning is that there is kind of a clear dividebetween how the political leadership, not just in Ukraine, but also in the U.S., sees this war and is willing to talk about this war and ways to end it. And the way that the military leadership, both in Ukraine and the U.S. sees this war and the way that the military leaders and generals that I have spoken to seem to feel that it is a tricky war to win an all out military victory.

And that usually military leaders confronted with that reality say, okay, we need to sit down at some point and start thinking about what a political solution would look like. On the other hand Ukraine's leadership has put forward a really maximalist position, which is we gotta take back all the territory, 1991 borders. And for President Zelenskyy, if he was to say anything else, he would be in deep trouble politically. And so then you come back to the U.S. political leadership and you say, okay, what is your goal here? And this is one piece of the puzzle that I think is really lacking in terms of our understanding overall of this conflict is: what does the White House want to see happen here? What is the metric for success?

Peter Bergen: During the first Gulf War, the objective was to eject Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait. It was achieved and, you know, Bush ended the war. Isn't it kind of a problem if we don't have a very clear strategic objective? It's a military problem and a political problem.

Clarissa Ward: Well, it becomes problematic in the sense of how do you end it. Because you don't know how to end something if you don't know what the end is supposed to look like. On the other hand, of course, it makes sense that President Zelensky says, ‘How can I possibly sit down with President Putin right now? How can I possibly trust a word he says? How can I possibly concede territory that thousands of Ukrainians have died for, and how can I possibly be sure that he's not going to stop, regroup, take three years, and then do the whole thing all over again?’ It's not like there's an easy answer here. There isn't. Nonetheless, I still feel that niggling question as a journalist and I am sure it will be coming more and more to the fore, as this war continues, of how does this end, what does an end look like and when does it begin?

Peter Bergen: The first war you covered was the Iraq War. Here we are two decades after the U.S. invaded. Why is it that, whether it's Putin in Ukraine or Bush in Iraq, that so many leaders think the war will be quick and decisive; they sell their populations on this idea, and it turns out to be something very different?

Clarissa Ward: I think firstly people believe what they want to believe, and certain types of leaders attract advisors who only tell them what they want to believe. And this is very clearly true in the case of President Putin who was actively and falsely encouraged to think that it was gonna be a cakewalk and that they were gonna go into Ukraine and people were gonna raise white flags and welcome them, and they were gonna set up their prop government and everything was gonna be done in a matter of days.

But I think it's also true of President Bush. And then you look at a president like Barack Obama, who I think kind of went to the other extreme where he wanted to see the full range and perspective and scope of every scenario, of every idea, of every possible situation. And that becomes crippling as well because it becomes much more difficult to make decisive, hard decisions and lead in those situations because you've gone into every single permutation possible and realized that none of them are ideal.

Peter Bergen: You know, you've been the subject of these feature stories in People magazine and Vanity Fair and Vogue. What do you make of this kind of attention?

Clarissa Ward: I mean, in some ways it's gratifying, of course, because it means that whatever it is that you're telling stories about, it's resonating with people and that's what I care about. On the other hand, I find it a little mystifying when you get asked for the 500th time, what it's like to be a woman in a war zone, what it's like to be a female war reporter. I find it sort of fascinating that people are still so curious about it because to me it seems almost commonplace at this stage. There are lots of women doing this work, so I'm always happy to answer people's questions and shatter some of the illusions about this work, but primarily my only interest in getting coverage like that or becoming a focus of public attention is getting that attention onto the stories.

Peter Bergen: Do you think there will come a moment when you say to yourself, you know, ‘I live in London. I could cover UK politics and the EU and maybe take the Eurostar to Paris or to Brussels and be back at home for dinner in time to see my kids.’

Clarissa Ward: Honestly, no. I don't rule out that things will change and my career might take on a different trajectory, but I still am more interested in ordinary people living through extraordinary moments than I am in anything else. And so I don't know what form that might take, but I, I can't imagine ever covering politics.

ARCHIVAL Clarissa Ward: This is how Ahmed Hemi spends his days - lying on the concrete floor trying to swat away the flies with what little energy he has. Looking at his tiny body ravaged by hunger, you would never guess that Ahmed is five years old. His brother died of malnutrition two months ago.

(Clarissa Ward translates as Soumaya speaks) We're in a war. There's no food, no water. His mother Soumaya says, only God knows our pain.

ARCHIVAL Clarrisa Ward (volume fading out): It's a pain shared by too many here in the same small village….

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If you want to know more about some of the stories and issues that we discussed in this episode we recommend… On All Fronts: The Education Of A Journalist by Clarissa Ward and It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War by Lynsey Addario.

We also recommend No Turning Back by Rania Abouzeid andWe Crossed A Bridge And It Trembled by Wendy Pearlman.

There is also an excellent film, A Private War, about Marie Colvin, a leading war correspondent who was killed during the Syrian civil war in 2012.

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