SECRETARY POWELL: I think the characterization of it as a watershed event is accurate, and one can compare it to Pearl Harbor. In Pearl Harbor, the United States was attacked by a foreign power. And on the 11th of September, we were attacked by a different kind of foreign power, a new kind of foreign power; not a state, but a terrorist organization, a non-state organization that has found harbors in many states, places to operate safely in many states around the world. We knew it was there, but we did not know how dangerous it was not only to the United States but to the 90 countries that lost people in the World Trade Center and how dangerous it was to our hopes and aspirations for a better world in the 21st century. And so it was a wakeup call to the United States and to the world that terrorism had to be fought and had to be defeated. For me personally, you can imagine what kind of a day it was, when I wasn't even in my own country when my country was being attacked. I was in Lima, Peru, and I spent a long, seven-hour flight getting back to the United States to help put together, under President Bush's leadership, a coalition, a coalition of nations that snapped together. I mean, you name an organization in the world and it was part of that coalition within a few weeks' time. Whether it was the Organization of American States, NATO, the General Assembly of the U.N., the Security Council of the U.N., the Organization of Islamic Conferences, the Organization of African Unity, they all came together - the Rio Treaty, the ANZUS Treaty - because everybody saw the threat and everybody wanted to respond to it. This was enormously reassuring to me, to the President, to the American people that everybody in the world understood the need for us to create such a coalition to go after this new enemy, this new enemy that was not only a threat to the United States but a threat to the civilized world.
SECRETARY POWELL: I think we have had considerable progress. First, Afghanistan is no longer a place in which al-Qaida can operate. We broke them in Afghanistan. Yes, there are remnants running around. Osama bin Laden, we don't know whether he is alive or dead or his whereabouts if he is alive but, nevertheless, Afghanistan is no longer a place in which they can operate. We also, in the process, removed a regime that was harboring them and refused to stop harboring them, the Taliban. And we have restored Afghanistan to a better form of government. We have given it a better form of government under President Karzai and with the Loya Jirga meeting and providing a democratic base for this new society; and we are involved with the international community in reconstructing that country and creating a better life for the people; and hundreds of thousands, who have been refugees, are returning to the country. That I think is a great success. An important achievement has been the fact that here it is now a year later and the coalition is still hard at work. It is not always a direct conflict against somebody like the Taliban; more often it's quiet, steady police work, intelligence exchange, tracking terrorist financing. And it has gone beyond al-Qaida to other terrorist organizations around the world. And we are showing success. Not a day goes by when you don't hear of another arrest of some individuals in a cell somewhere who were plotting and planning, and not just against the United States but against other nations. So I think the work will continue. And as President Bush said repeatedly, we have to be patient, we have to be dogged, we have to stick with it, and we realize it is not going to be won in a single battle. It is going to be a campaign that will take years. And he has committed the American people to that campaign for whatever amount of time it takes. And I believe the coalition has indicated, certainly in every way that is imaginable, that they are in it for the long run as well.