Transcript: Lawrence Wright

Conducted on June 5, 2007, by David Dryer and Henry Shepherd.

DD: The first thing I want to ask is that you describe in the "Looming Tower", the evolution of far enemy jihad and specifically the focus on the U.S., and the role of Abu Hajer al-Iraqi. But I was hoping you could expand on that, not only ideological but also material shifts; explain the total reverse in focus from an anti-communist army, as you put it, to being a terrorist entity really focused on the United States.

LW: When Bin Laden created al-Qaeda he didn't think of it as a terror organization, he thought of it as a kind of Muslim foreign legion, that would go wherever Muslims were threatened. His initial goals were to chase the Soviets out of Afghanistan, to pursue them through central Asia, and then also to topple the communist government that was then in control of Yemen. That was really his main attempt at that time, was to create this kind of anti-communist legion. It was...there were several things that changed the course of action that turned al-Qaeda into a terror organization, and they were different for both Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two man in al-Qaeda, and bin Laden. For Zawahiri, his goal all along since he was a child was to overthrow the Egyptian government and install an Islamic-ruled country. But the Egyptian government fought back with such savagery that his entire movement was uprooted, and essentially destroyed. And so he was no longer able to function in Egypt so part of his motivation to turn away from the nearer enemy to the far enemy was, as the jihadi discourse in terms it, was the fact that he simply couldn't operate his own country. For bin Laden it was a little different. In 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and then massed his troops on the Saudi borders, bin Laden proposed that he would use al-Qaeda to defend the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, along with 100,000 unemployed Saudi youth and the equipment from the Saudi bin Laden construction company.

DD: To dig trenches, right?

LW: Yeah essentially, you know, build burms and that sort of thing. I guess a million-man army in Iraq and one of the largest tank corps in the world, and of course he was laughed out of the defense minister's office when he made his proposal. But, there's an injunction in Islam, and it goes back to the prophet Mohammed on his deathbed saying, "Let there be no two religions in Arabia." And of course at the time prophet Mohammed died, the Arabian peninsula was highly populated with Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims, and polytheists. But over time, strict Muslims like bin Laden, Wahhabis in particular, had taken this injunction to mean the entire peninsula should be purged of any non-Muslim. So when the Saudis brought in half a million American troops, Christians and Jews and of course women as well, that was really galling to him. And he turned against the royal family. Al-Qaeda theorists told him, though, 'We won't be able to attack them directly, because you won't have the popular support; attack America instead and it will show the craven dependence of this royal family on the U.S., and that will undermine the support of the population for the royal family.' So that was his motivation for turning against the U.S.

DD: We hear a lot about the durability of Salafist ideology and how, once al-Qaeda central was sort of broken up, to use Bruce Hoffman's terminology, "the Al-Qaeda network" or "al-Qaeda locals" were sort of in place and recruiting, you know, radicals who were in country. There was an incredible durability of the ideology, but it seems like part of the explanation then is that there was some kind of institutional momentum where, once they were spurned by the Saudi government and there was sort of no other place to go, that just by virtue of wanting to continue the organization there was some imperative to find a new goal almost. Is that a fair description?

LW: There was some truth in it, that he had created this organization.... Originally al-Qaeda was started as the Soviet Union was beginning to withdraw from Afghanistan. It announced it's intentions to pull out of Afghanistan. So when the jihad against the Soviets was won, there were these Arab fighters, the Arab mujahideen, and it was Bin Laden's notion, 'Let's capture these guys and keep this movement going". So originally there was a sense that we have them here, let's take advantage of them. And then, after that there was an attempt to try and keep al-Qaeda alive. During the Sudan years, for instance, there was very little for them to do in terms of jihad. They were mainly farmers... al-Qaeda had become a kind of agricultural organization. So it was not well put to use, but he was able to hold the organization together during those years. And then during the migration to Afghanistan in 1996, he was only able to take a fraction of his followers there because he was broke, but all along he was trying to hold this organization together even though his goals were constantly changed.

DD: Do you conceive of the threat that al-Qaeda poses now is radically different from the threat that it posed immediately before and after 9/11, and we hear a lot about homegrown terrorism, but that seems to track pretty nicely with the network that Ramzi Yousef and others set up. There was a homegrown cell behind the Nairobi attack, as well. So do you think that it's fundamentally different now or do you think that it is basically still the same structure as a terrorist (?????) now as it was then, just with different players?

LW: It's not the same structure, it's a more complicated structure. Originally, al-Qaeda was very hierarchical, top-down management style.... Al-Qaeda is a much more complicated organization now than it was in it's early years. In it's early years, it was very hierarchical, top-down management style as you'd expect from a business student that bin Laden had been. You had to fill out a form in triplicate to get a new tire, you had health benefits, a month-long paid vacation; it was a good job for a lot of these guys. But the al-Qaeda strategists realized early on, as early as 1998--when they began their assault on America with the bombings of embassys in East Africa--they knew that that couldn't last; that that would eventually be smashed. So they imagined a much more horizontal organization, very much like street gangs, which was what you saw in Madrid and London; these are loosely organized, al-Qaeda-inspired networks that may have some tangential connection to the 'mother ship,' but are... they benefit from the training and the internet propaganda that al-Qaeda has provided for them. All of that was envisioned by al-Qaeda strategists. So the 'mother ship' still exists, it's still important, but you can't ignore the fact that bin Laden and Zawahiri play leading roles in al-Qaeda, but the organization itself multiplied into different branches.

DD: And ideologically as well as, I assume, in terms of training, the difference between the 7/7 bombings and the 7/21 bombings, for example in London, the 7/7 bombings had more explosive training in al-Qaeda camps; so it seems like the actual tactical knowledge that only al-Qaeda can impart in the camps in Afghanistan...

LW: Training make a difference. The fact that the internet has become a tremendous resource for al-Qaeda wannabes is very important, but nothing replaces the factor of the training and the network that Jihadi can get when they're together in a place, and that's why eliminating the sanctuaries in Afghanistan was so important, and that's why it's such a catastrophe that al-Qaeda has taken root not just in Afghanistan but in Somalia, in Mali, and of course in Iraq, and the tribal areas of Pakistan. They're not homeless anymore.

DD: Right. To just radically change gears for just a minute; part of what we're looking at with the Global Security Matrix at Brown is notions of safety and the conception of feeling safe and also being safe. So with respect to both foreign policy, intelligence policy, and also homeland-defense policy, what actually protects us from Islamist, Salafist terror, what protects us from the global Salafi jihad, and what makes us feel safe?And especially if you could discuss if there's any gulfs between those two different sets of policies.

LW: What makes us safe in this country is not the contact lens solution they take away from you at the airport, it's the fact that the average American Muslim makes a higher wage than the average American, is twice as likely to go to college, is much less likely to go to prison. Compare that to, for instance France, where about 7-12% of the population is Muslim, 50% of the prisoners are: such a stark measure of the degree of alienation and marginality that's felt in Europe as compared to the U.S. That's what makes us safer, is the integration of our Muslim and Arab citizens into our society. And we risk quite a lot when we alienate that segment. I think we're fortunate that it hasn't come to the situation that we find in Europe today which is where I think al-Qaeda in many respects poses its greatest threat.

DD: And with respect to how that population might be alienated, in terms of our foreign policy, I think that one could argue either way that during our Cold War foreign policy, that our foreign policy was keeping us safe and making us feel safe but also making us less safe, you know through policies of Mutually Assured Destruction, et cetera. Is that the case in America now? Is our foreign policy having a marked impact on our safety with respect to radicalizing Muslim populations, or putting us at more risk through the radicalization that Iraq might inspire, or does it not make a difference really?

LW: Well bin Laden had a strategy when he attacked America; he wanted to bait the U.S. to invade Afghanistan and replicate the same mistake that the Soviet Union had made. If you remember what happened when the Soviets invaded, they spent ten years in Afghanistan, and then in 1989 they withdrew, and it simply shattered, fell apart. That's what bin Laden thought could happen to America; he thought the United States could become the dis-United States, and he completely miscalculated. Within six weeks, American and coalition forces had swept aside the Taliban, pummeled al-Qaeda. If you read al-Qaeda's memoirs and internal documents, they admit 80% of their membership were captured and killed; al-Qaeda was essentially dead. The leaders got away, but the survivors were isolated, destitute, unable to communicate, repudiated all over the world. Essentially the War on Terror was over, and al-Qaeda was dead, December, 2001. It was the invasion of Iraq that brought that movement back to life. So yes, our foreign policy played a critical and devastating role in our War on Terror.

DD: Would you say that Afghanistan still has some degree of primacy in terms of our experience being a mirror of the Soviet's experience? Do you you think that a troop increase in Afghanistan, an attempt to undermine the resurgence of the Taliban, is that still a vital strategic goal, or is it now secondary to Iraq? Where would you put that in the hierarchy of needs in combatting terrorism?

LW: In terms of the administration's hierarchy?

DD: No, no, in terms of practicing what we actually need to do to undermine you know, either the rhetorical or strategic influence of al-Qaeda and Salafi jihad generally.

LW: In Afghanistan we have a strategic need to stabilize our country and to provide some kind of window for, if not a fully democratic state, but a more open and tolerant system to survive and then to endure. We have a real strategic need for that, to keep the Taliban from taking over that country, once again, and turning it into a sanctuary for al-Qaeda. That's a desperately important goal. We have the same strategic need in Iraq, along with a moral burden of having caused this situation in the first place. Afghanistan invited the response that it received in November, 2001, by becoming essentially an enemy of the west and the United States in particular. Iraq didn't have that. Saddam Hussein posed a threat, but not an immediate one, and not directly towards us. But our actions have created this moral burden, I think. Along with the strategic necessity of trying to stabilize Iraq, we have incurred this debt to the Iraqi people for this situation that we created.

DD: You mentioned before the importance of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan as an al-Qaeda's stronghold, and the resurgence of 'al-Qaeda central' there in North Waziristan is alarming to say the least, in the last four or five months. Do you think that that should be more of a focus of our counter-terror efforts, especially with Musharraf being as weak now as he's ever been? How much of that is in our cross-hairs as a sort of locus of counter-terrorism activity, and how much more should it be, if at all?

LW: It could well be that we know where bin Laden is, and essentially we do know, in general, where he is, and we've decided not to get him. That the cost of getting him is greater than that of leaving him to operate inside the tribal areas. There's a fear inside the American Intelligence community, amounting to a kind of paralysis, about what might happen if we went into the tribal areas: we might capsize the Musharraf government, and let the Islamic radicals take over, and they would have the bomb, and they would give it to al-Qaeda. This is the nightmare that American policy-makers have every night. I don't agree with their analysis of Pakistan, I don't think it's nearly as unstable as they seem to think it is. For one thing, the army in Pakistan owns nearly everything: they own the best insurance companies, and hotels, and real estate, and you can join the army, so there's a kind of democratic aspect to it, as well. But, they have an interest in stability, and not letting everything go to pieces, because their pensions are all there. So, I don't think it's quite as volatile as a lot of Administration policy-makers make it out to be.

DD: That's a heartening, I'd say. Again to change gears: to those who envision a time, however many years from now, when, if we were sitting down with you, you would be discussing something other than terrorism, is there a time when we will have moved beyond terror? Is there going to be a time when terrorism is not going to be relevant, either because it doesn't pose a threat, or because we conceive of it differently, and if so, how do we get to that point? Are we going to win the War on Terrorism, is it going to be sort of, 19th century anarchism in England, where it just sort of has its moment and fades? I mean, in the broadest terms possible, how do you conceive arriving at that point, if we can at all?

LW: Well, al-Qaeda's going to be 20 years old next year. That's a long time for a terrorist organization to endure, and it's not showing any signs of dwindling away. It's very much the opposite; the idea of al-Qaeda and bin Laden has really been spreading. And also, these are super-empowered terrorists. They may be small individuals, but with advances in technology and global communications and so on takes on, the potency of a small group, or an idea, to catch fire and spread has never been greater. So, I think that eventually al-Qaeda will die out, but the notion of terrorism, of influencing world events by, you know, a small group having that amazing amount of power, I don't think that's going to change. I think that the civilizations are going to be facing a much greater threat for the conceivable future, from various groups, not just radical Islam. It could be radical environmentalism it could be another radical form of politics, a kind of resurgent fascist goal. There are many different things that one can envision, and the factors that gave rise to bin Laden and radical Islam, the sense of being outsiders in the world, of feeling encroached upon by civilizations that you don't approve of, of the anonymous of, the anonymity of modern life, all of those things can give rise to radicalism in many different forms.

DD: Wonderful. Well thank you very much for making time to talk to us today.

LW: Oh, it was a pleasure, guys. Sorry for all the ruckus.