Peter L. Bergen

The madrassa scapegoat

A national security policy focused on madrassas as a principal source of terrorism is misguided. A careful examination of the 79 terrorists responsible for five of the worst anti‐Western terrorist attacks in recent memory reveals that only in rare cases were madrassa graduates involved.

Assessing the Jihadist Terrorist Threat to America and American Interests

Al Qaeda and allied groups continue to pose a threat to the United States. Although it is less severe than the catastrophic proportions of a 9/11-like attack, the threat today is more complex and more diverse than at any time over the past nine years. Al Qaeda or its allies continue to have the capacity to kill dozens, or even hundreds, of Americans in a single attack. A key shift in the past couple of years is the increasingly prominent role in planning and operations that U.S. citizens and residents have played in the leadership of Al Qaeda and aligned groups, and the higher numbers of Americans attaching themselves to these groups. Another development is the increasing diversification of the types of U.S.-based jihadist militants, and the groups with which those militants have affiliated. Indeed, these jihadists do not fit any particular ethnic, economic, educational, or social profile. Al Qaedas ideological influence on other jihadist groups is on the rise in South Asia and has continued to extend into countries like Yemen and Somalia; Al Qaedas top leaders are still at large, and American overreactions to even unsuccessful terrorist attacks arguably have played, however inadvertently, into the hands of the jihadists. Working against Al Qaeda and allied groups are the ramped-up campaign of drone attacks in Pakistan, increasingly negative Pakistani attitudes and actions against the militants based on their territory, which are mirrored by increasingly hostile attitudes toward Al Qaeda and allied groups in the Muslim world in general, and the fact that erstwhile militant allies have now also turned against Al Qaeda. This article is based on interviews with a wide range of senior U.S. counterterrorism officials at both the federal and local levels, and embracing the policy, intelligence, and law enforcement communities, supplemented by the authors’ own research.

Al Qaeda, the Organization: A Five-Year Forecast:

Al Qaeda today is a resilient organization, as evidenced by the London attacks of 2005, its resurgence in Pakistan, the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, and its influence on the war in Iraq. While al Qaeda is not strong enough to launch an attack inside the United States in the next five years, it will continue to train militants for successful attacks in Europe. Al Qaedas leadership is likely to remain in place for years, and it is unlikely to lose its safe haven on the Afghan-Pakistan border in the near term, although it has suffered real reverses in Iraq. Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups will, in the long term, implode because of their unrestrained violence against fellow Muslims and lack of a real plan for governance, both of which make it difficult for them to transform into a genuine, political mass movement.

Revisiting the Early Al Qaeda: An Updated Account of its Formative Years

Ten years after 9/11, and after the death of Osama bin Laden, this article re-examines the early history of Al Qaeda—from its founding in August 1988 up until bin Ladens declaration of war against the United States in Afghanistan in 1996—by examining the groups aims, operations, alliances, finances, and administration during five distinct phases of the evolution of bin Ladens worldview. The authors argue that in assessing the formative years of bin Ladens organization, it is equally wrong to minimize the ambitions and organization of the early Al Qaeda as it is to telescope back from the Al Qaeda of the 9/11 attacks to argue that the group was organizing itself to wage a global Jihad from its inception. The authors outline how it was only a half decade later—after the group had decamped to Sudan, and after the U.S. had deployed troops in Saudi Arabia and Somalia—that al Qaeda shifted to conceiving its central mission as attacking American targets.

The Bin Laden Trial: What Did We Learn?

The Manhattan trial of four men linked to Osama bin Laden was the result of the largest overseas investigation ever mounted by the U.S. government. The trial generated thousands of pages of documents and the testimony of dozens of witnesses with some knowledge of bin Ladens group. What was learned from the trial is that bin Ladens organization experienced severe cash flow problems in the mid-1990s; that the U.S. government has had some real successes in finding informants within bin Ladens organization; that bin Laden has taken steps to acquire weapons of mass destruction; that the training of bin Ladens followers in his camps in Afghanistan is quite rigorous, featuring tuition on a wide range of weapons and explosives and terrorism techniques; and that bin Ladens group operates transnationally, its membership drawn from four continents. Finally, the trial underlines the strengths and limits of the law enforcement approach to bin Laden.

Drone Wars: Decade of the Drone

The Need for Accurate Information About Drone Strikes The rise in the covert use of drones outside of traditional battlefields has come to define US counterterrorism efforts under President Obama. It serves as one of the core policies defining the transition from George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terrorism” to what Obama has termed a “war with a specific network, al-Qaeda, and its terrorist affiliates who support efforts to attack the United States, our allies, and partners.” The rapid increase in covert drone attacks managed by both the CIA and US Joint Special Operations Command outside of traditional war zones present multiple moral, legal, and strategic questions regarding new technologies and the changing nature of warfare. While the debate on these issues is robust, if not highly divisive, substantively addressing drone policy requires establishing a firm factual foundation. Using reports from a variety of reliable news outlets, New America – a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, DC – has gathered material on drone strikes from 2002 to the present. The media outlets used by New America for its database of drone strikes are: the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse ; US newspapers: the New York Times , the Washington Post , the Los Angeles Times , and the Wall Street Journal ; British newspapers: the Telegraph and the Guardian ; and Pakistani news outlets: the Express Tribune , Dawn , the Daily Times , Geo TV, and the News ; as well as the news outlets BBC and CNN.

Defeating the Attempted Global Jihadist Insurgency: Forty Steps for the Next President to Pursue against al Qaeda, Like-Minded Groups, Unhelpful State Actors, and Radicalized Sympathizers

Since September 11, 2001, al Qaeda has attempted to morph into a popular movement—what some have called “al Qaeda 2.0.” If the United States is fighting against a global campaign of terrorism and classic insurgencies (or an attempted global jihadist insurgency), then it should employ a global counterinsurgency strategy to combat al Qaeda 2.0. This article recommends such a strategy, including the following suggestions: develop the military, intelligence, and language capabilities needed to win the conflict; improve counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and eliminate safe havens in Pakistan; expand counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq; manage “blowback” and monitor ungoverned regions; develop an Internet-based strategy to attack the jihadis; start fighting the “war of ideas” like we mean it; adopt a more proactive foreign policy; and better secure the U.S. homeland.

The Best Books on Terrorism Published During 2004

It may have been a very mixed year for America’s progress in the war on terror, but it was a very good year for book buyers trying to understand the evolution of Al Qaeda, the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terrorism, and the future direction of jihadist terrorism. Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin,

The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader

29.95) will surely stand as the definitive account of U.S. successes and failures in Afghanistan over the two decades leading up to the 11 September attacks. The 1979–89 Afghan war was arguably the most important conflict in the post–World War II period, both because it revealed the Soviet army to be a paper tiger, thereby hastening the demise of the Soviet empire, and because it helped incubate the Islamist Internationale that has spread terrorism from Manhattan to Madrid. Despite the importance of the Afghan jihad, there has been little serious investigation of the largest U.S. covert action program since the Vietnam War. Coll, the managing editor of The Washington Post, has addressed this gap by interviewing many of those involved in the Afghan operation and doing what all too few reporters trouble to do: read documents. He has also written lively portraits of such key players as William Casey, the former director of Central Intelligence who backed the Afghan mujaheddin; and Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of Afghanistan’s antiTaliban Northern Alliance, who was murdered by Al Qaeda assassins on 9 September 2001. It’s a testament to Coll’s reportorial skills that during the 9/11 Commission’s public hearings, commissioners repeatedly cited his investigation into highly classified U.S. attempts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s. The 9/11 Commission Report (Norton,

The Osama bin Laden I Know

10) that emerged out of the commission’s interviews, document requests, and public hearings is a masterful narrative of the growth of Al Qaeda and the planning of 9/11. The report is written in a crisp style far removed