America has learned "absolutely nothing" from its wars with Afghanistan and Iraq, and now, its war with Iran could drag on for another two years, CNN security analyst Peter Bergen says.
"We're in this stalemate, with no resolution in sight," Bergen told Midday Report's Guyon Espiner.
He said he did not expect any change to the state of the war until after the US midterm elections on 3 November.
"Then who the hell knows, because Trump changes his mind on a dime very quickly. One day he's saying, 'we've got a great deal with the Iranians'. The next day 'we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age'.
"It's very hard to negotiate with somebody like that," Bergen said.
He described the conflict as a "mutually hurting stalemate", but said the two sides were not taking the steps needed to reach a peace agreement.
"This could go on for another two years, I think. While Trump is in office, he doesn't seem to be in the mood for compromise. The Iranians also, right now they're very far apart."
Peter Bergen and New Zealand journalist Peter Arnett conducted the first-ever televised interview with Osama bin Laden for CNN in 1997.
Smoke rises following missile strikes in Tehran on 1 March 2026.
AFP / Atta Kenare
Bergen's new book, All the Presidents' Wars, assesses the key decisions made by four presidents - George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump - in the US response to the September 11 attacks.
US response to 9/11 'got a lot of things wrong'
He said the US military response to 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq did achieve its goal of preventing a major foreign terrorist attack on the United States, but it came at a cost.
"There were 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed, 45,000 Afghan civilians killed, 66,000 Afghan police and military killed, $6 trillion of American taxpayer dollars, 7,000 American service members, and then, of course, our allies as well.
"And we got a lot of things wrong. The Iraq war, of course, being the principal exhibit.
"But also the botched Afghan withdrawal in 2021, and now the stalemated war in Iran.
"So we see that the post-9/11 conflicts have a very long tail."
Bergen told Midday Report the September 11 attacks by Al-Qaeda were not a result of an intelligence failure in the US, but a policy failure.
He said the Bush administration had plenty of strategic warning from the CIA that something big was coming from Al-Qaeda, but didn't absorb the advice.
A man walks through the rubble after the collapse of the first World Trade Center tower, 11 September 2001, New York.
AFP / Doug Kanter
"They were veterans of the Cold War and they couldn't conceive of a non-state actor like Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden being a significant threat, even though they'd already blown up two US embassies in Africa in 1998 and almost sunk a US destroyer in 2000 in Yemen. They just didn't register this as a problem."
Bergen said the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at the Battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in 2001 was a monumental blunder.
"The CIA had plenty of information that bin Laden was at the Battle of Tora Bora. They requested additional American boots on the ground.
"By my calculation, there were more international journalists at the Battle of Tora Bora than American soldiers, which kind of speaks for itself."
He said a CIA request for a battalion of about 800 US Army Rangers was turned down, allowing bin Laden and other senior Al-Qaeda figures to escape.
"I think we wouldn't be having this conversation in the same way if bin Laden and many of his top leaders had been captured," Bergen told Midday Report.
"It would have been harder to make the arguments for the Iraq war that we heard in 2002 and 2003 if Al-Qaeda had really been ... destroyed at the Battle of Tora Bora."