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Holy War, Inc.
With Peter L. Bergen
Author/Terrorism analyst, CNN
Monday, Feb. 11, 2002; 11 a.m. EST
The Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., were the most deadly terrorist attacks ever in America -- carefully orchestrated, precision operations requiring extensive funding and sophisticated planning. And what we've learned about the al Qaeda organization reveals a maze of "cells" and plans of attack that ostensibly rival those of corporations.
In his book, "Holy War, Inc.," CNN terrorism analyst Peter L. Bergen, one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden in person, outlines both the underlying ideology of Islamic extremism that fuels al Qaeda, and the overlying structure that makes it possible. Bergen was online Monday, Feb. 11. He will appear for a book signing at Olsson's Metro Center on Tuesday, Feb. 12, at 7 p.m. EST.
Bergen is a veteran news producer for ABC News and CNN, where he reported on various news stories including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He has written for publications including The New Republic, Vanity Fair and The Times of London. A graduate of Oxford University, Bergen won the Leonard Silk Journalism Fellowship and was a Pew-Journalist-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins University in 2001.
The transcript follows.
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washingtonpost.com: Good morning, Peter, and welcome. A story in this morning's Post discusses at length the civilians that have been killed in the attempts to track down members of al Qaeda. Given that Afghanistan has suffered a generation of war, how are these "miscalculations" viewed by Muslims in the region? Does it affect the image of the United States, both in Afghanistan and in the Muslim world?
Peter L. Bergen: It's an interesting question, and clearly there seems to be more reporting on this subject now than there was during the major hostilities. It's impossible to tally the number of Afghan civilian casualties as a result of the war, but the New York Times is suggesting that, sadly, hundreds -- and I think the problem is really in Afghanistan. I think that if the United States continues to kill civilians now that there's a new government, it puts the new government in a difficult situation, surely.
Alexandria, Va.: Mohammad Atta in his suicide note barely mentioned politics, never mentioned Israel, but discussed at length the rewards for holy warriors that includes having sex with beautiful women in heaven.
Are the members of al Qaeda religious terrorists who happen to have political demands, or are they political terrorists who happen to be religious?
Is their primary motive religious or political?
Peter L. Bergen: For them, there's no distinction between the religious and the political. It is their understanding of Islam which has motivated them, and there are certain political outcomes that they desire based on their understanding of Islam. For instance, the call for removing U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia is based on their interpretation of the prophet Mohammed's words, "let there be no two religions in Arabia." In conclusion, the religious and the political are inextricably intertwined for this group. Christ made a distinction -- he said "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" -- Christianity has had this distinction between the sacred and the secular. The prophet Mohammed was a political leader, a religious leader and a military leader. Obviously in practice, there have been differences between the religious leader and the temporal leader -- so there is a distinction, and sadly, for these people, there is none.
Oklahoma City, Okla.: Is there a long-term solution for the deteriorating relations between America and the Muslim middle east? I see things getting worse rather than better and wonder what could possibly reverse the trend and the inevitable hardships that will result. I see America's primary interests in the region as oil and protecting Israel, which may be an indirect means of protecting our oil supply. In your opinion would breaking our dependency on middle east oil help the situation or would that only hand militant fundamentalists more power and allow them to further radicalize the politics of the region?
Peter L. Bergen: On the oil question -- the United States is less dependent on Middle Eastern oil than it would have been in the '70s. Venezuela and Russia export a lot more oil to the United States than before, so that does change our dependence, obviously. And that has to be a factor in examination of our relationship with the Saudis -- you're getting a lot of reporting from Saudi Arabia that you didn't get before. I think the Saudis have come to realize that they need to explain themselves, and you're seeing more of that.
But the fact of the situation is that Israel is enflaming passions. What to do about that, I don't really know. The United States has been an ally of Israel's since 1948, when Truman recognized the state. So it seems one of these intractable problems a bit like Kashmir, so maybe we can all just blame the British.
Bethesda, Md.: I understand part of bin Laden argument about U.S. troops on the holy land. What I do not understand is the reason that they were there -- it was to prevent Sadaam from invading again?
Peter L. Bergen: You know, there was a very good piece by Bernard Lewis in Foreign Affairs about two years ago, in which he says bin Laden's about American troops in Saudi Arabia did not just emerge from bin Laden's thinking. First of all, the prophet Mohammed said "let there be no two religions in Arabia" on his deathbed. And some of Mohammed's successors sort of followed that up by banning non-Muslims from the heartland of Saudi Arabia. So there is a corpus of Islamic jurisprudence which bin Laden can call upon, and all Muslims agree that non-Muslims should not be in Mecca or Medina, for instance. And there are serious Muslims who are not at all in favor of violence against the United States who are not comfortable with the American presence in the Arabian peninsula.
What happened during the Gulf War was that America was invited to help defend against Saddam Hussein, and what it became was a permanent military presence. Not only that, it was being used as a base from which to launch attacks against another Muslim nation, Iraq, after the Gulf War had ended. That's why there are people who object to it, though they're not necessarily calling for violence.
On a final point, the British and the French could have occupied Arabia in the early 20th century, but chose not to. Perhaps because of these kinds of sensitivities. All that being said, there have been Americans -- civilians -- by the tens of thousands in Saudi Arabia for decades. So it really seems it's the presence of troops that's the critical issue. None of this is to say that I'm defending bin Laden's position. But I'm just trying to explain that he did not make it up out of whole cloth.
Paris, France: Do you believe that the U.S. missed a chance prior to Sept. 11 to negotiate successfully with the Taliban the turning over to U.S. authorities or the "accidental death" of bin Laden?
Peter L. Bergen: It's an interesting question. I think both the United States' position and the Taliban's position about handing over bin Laden before Sept. 11 had hardened into positions reminiscent of trench warfare in World War I -- neither side was going to give an inch. And might there have been some kind of solution where the OIC could have been involved to come up with a face-saving solution where bin Laden might have been tried in a special court, such as the Libyan bombers of Pan Am 103 were tried in the Hague. It's certainly an interesting question, but it's easy to Monday-morning quarterback all these decisions after the fact. And in my interviews with several Taliban cabinet members, the one thing they all seemed to agree on was that they'd never hand over bin Laden. And clearly they didn't. There were elements in the Taliban who were not that happy about bin Laden's continued presence, but clearly they did not have the upper hand. And I think what happened with the Taliban in 2001 was a kind of Jacobean wing won all the arguments -- and the illustration of that was the destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan and the edicts making Afghanistan's tiny Hindu population wear distinctive yellow clothing and their continued refusal to hand over bin Laden. What happened in 2001 was that the hard-liners seemed to have won the day. Because when I was in Afghanistan in December of 1999, there were signs that more moderate members of the Taliban might have been prevailing. For instance, schools for girls were opening up in rural areas and even in Kabul. This was sort of tolerated in an unofficial sense. So the Taliban was never a monolithic movement, like any political movement.
Alexandria, Va.: You have mentioned bin Laden threatening to kill you if he saw you again, and then seeing you again but not killing you.
Why didn't he?
Peter L. Bergen: I've never mentioned him killing me. Why would he want to kill me? I've only seen him once. Bin Laden probably has no idea who I am -- and could care less.
Ontario, Canada: Hi Peter,
Given Osama bin Laden's ability to escape capture thus far, would it be plausible to assume that in the event of his demise, be it from ill health or otherwise, he would instruct those around him to conceal his death in order to keep the details of his whereabouts, even in death ongoing? In essence, the "not knowing where he is, or where he might be" could still pose a threat?
Thanks.
Cam M
Peter L. Bergen: I think that's a good point. There's sort of no closure if he evaporates, even if he's dead, and that's a problem. The number one war aim, as I far as I can tell, is to get bin Laden.
Dublin, Ireland: Why do you think the U.S. administration refuses to even mention anything concerning the CIA and U.S. military ties with bin Laden going back decades? Don't you think that admitting past mistakes helps to reduce the possibility that they will be repeated?
Peter L. Bergen: In my book I devoted a chapter to this question, and I'm not in the business of either defending or offending the CIA, but I'm interested in what the truth of the matter is. Bin Laden's contacts with the CIA, in my estimation, were zero. It fails all sorts of common sense tests. First of all, if you were bin Laden's case officer, you'd have the largest book contract in history. The thing about conspiracies is that people talk. And we're well aware of the conspiracies that the CIA was involved in -- Iran Contra, Guatemala, Honduras -- these things all came out. Bin Laden had his own money, lots of it, operated secretively and has been anti-American since the early '80s. I've talked to people on the U.S. government side who are familiar with bin Laden's organization, and they say there haven't been any contacts. This scenario of CIA-Afghan-Arab creation is presented as an axiom, but with no evidence. The mistake the CIA made was handing $3 billion to the Pakistanis during the Afghan war and saying to the Pakistanis, you decide which Afghan faction will get the money. At any given time, the CIA only had six people in Pakistan, and they were basically signing checks. They were not out in the field, they rarely met with Afghans, let alone Afghan Arabs like bin Laden. Bin Laden wasn't on the radar screen; no one understood the importance his group would take on. But there came a certain point in the war against the Soviets when the U.S. government had enough information about militant Afghan leaders like Gul Buddin Hekmatyar, who was neither an effective general and was anti-American and along side him trained a lot of these Afghan Arabs. And the mistake was not to turn around to the Pakistanis and say we should be funnelling this money to more effective commanders and people who are not sort of reflexively anti-Western. Hekmatyar is now in exile in Iran, and according to today's New York Times, is still making veiled threats against the United States. Here's a guy who by the most conservative estimate got $600 million. So that was the mistake.
The other common sense test that this fails is that there were hundreds of thousands of Afghans who were willing to fight the Arabs. So the picture is a lot more complicated. The CIA has made a lot of mistakes, but the allegations that they funded bin Laden is not one of them. Finally, it's worth remembering that the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in 1989 was one of the final nails in the coffin of the Soviet empire. So in that sense, the United States operation there was a brilliant success.
Annandale, Va.: Let's assume that the U.S. withdrew troops from Saudi Arabia, backed off from sanctioning Iraq and forced a fair peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians: do you think that al Qaeda would still continue to target America and American interests?
Peter L. Bergen: That's a good question. Certain terrorist groups, say the IRA, had a narrow set of political aims. At the end of the day you could sit down at the negotiating table and say we can give you this if you give us this. Now with al Qaeda it's difficult to imagine that. They're calling for changing of all American policies in the Middle East -- not only the ones that you mention in the question, but also any support for regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. There have been murmurings about U.S. troops possibly being withdrawn. You have Carl Levin of the Armed Services Committee talking about them being withdrawn. And then also, at least off the record, Saudi officials muttering about it. So in the long term, perhaps that will happen. And the sanctions against Iraq have been modified. But ultimately, the fate Iraq is determined by Saddam Hussein, and if he continues to not let weapons inspectors in, there may be consequences. And a peace agreement with Israel -- I'm not an expert, but it seems a long way away. None of these things are going to happen overnight, if at all. So for groups like al Qaeda, they will remain an irritant.
Looking at it at a larger level, it seems to me, that bin Laden wanted to provoke a kind of clash of civilizations in an effort to get Muslim populations to rise up and install Taliban-style theocracies across the region. It didn't happen. And demonstrations in favor of bin Laden were in the tens of thousands, not in the millions -- in cities like Karachi, where you can have millions take to the streets, it didn't happen. So there may be resentments against American foreign policy, but that has not meant that bin Laden's political views and calls for attacks on Americans -- he didn't really gain a huge following, as it turned out. I think the major reason for that was that unprovoked assaults on thousands of civilians cannot be justified, on any grounds.
Washington, D.C.: What is your current opinion of the war on terrorism? Specifically, do you think bin Laden's al Qaeda network is being successfully destroyed?
Peter L. Bergen: I think the prognosis in the short term is not great. Because President Bush said in his State of the Union that tens of thousands have cycled through the training camps. And some of those people are going to come and attack the United States -- there'll be other Richard Reids out there. But in the long term, al Qaeda's out of business. The top leadership's on the run, the terror training camps in Afghanistan are closed, and their ability to sustain themselves seems to be over. When I say short term, I mean in the next year or two; the bombings on the U.S. embassies in Africa took five years to plan. And the events of Sept. 11 seem to have taken two years to plan. It's quite possible that other things were in the pipeline before Sept. 11 that may come to fruition years from now. We just don't know. In the short term I think you'd have to be wildly optimistic not to believe that there will be other attacks. In the long term, we hopefully have seen the end of al Qaeda.
But one final thought: Leaving aside the question of al Qaeda, what this group demonstrated was that this is the ultimate NGO -- non-governmental organization. In a globalized world, where information is diffuse, people can travel cheaply, you have the Internet and satellite phones, this group was able to emerge. It didn't require state support like groups required in the '70s and '80s. Al Qaeda may be the model for other groups. Globalization empowered individuals, and there was a debate on the left that it left people behind and a debate on the right that people prospered. Nobody was noticing that it also empowered people who wanted to do a lot of damage. And bin Laden was able to take advantage of that. He created a global network as an individual. I think that's got to be a first, right? The U.S. went to war against an individual. Another first. There's the potential for other trans-national groups to emerge that may have nothing to do with al Qaeda.
washingtonpost.com:
That wraps up today's show. Thanks to everyone who joined the
discussion.
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