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LSE: Public lectures and events
Can single individuals still shape history? The Case of Osama bin Laden
01:27:49
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- [00:00]
A
Good evening.
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B
Welcome.
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A
That's a really good crowd here. My name is Stefan Hertog. I'm a lecturer at the government department. And as you all know, it's very exciting times in the Middle east on many levels. And it's very exciting times also for specialists of political violence or terrorism. And that gives us the opportunity to put together really quite interesting, quite varied program of public speakers at the lse. And I think what we have today is really the climax of this program. It's a very exciting event about a big historical Middle east figure. This time, luckily not a benefactor of the school, at least not to my knowledge. He's been dead for three and a half weeks and other one's still alive. And that, I think gives us the right breathing space to think a little bit about the historical, the political, the ideological impact of that figure. And there's no one better to speak about Osama bin Laden than Michael Shawyer, who's been, I think, more closely involved in terms of his intelligence work with that one person than probably anyone else in the US government. He was the head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999. He remained a counterterrorism analyst at the agency until 2004. He is the author of Imperial Hubris why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism. And he's, of course, the author of this biography of Osama bin Laden, which is available, I should point out, for purchase. And there'll also be a signing for whoever is interested right after the lecture. So the format is that Michael will speak for about 45 minutes. There'll be 45 minutes, Q&A, and then a few more minutes afterwards for an informal chat. And then we shall disband. The lecture is recorded for whoever wants to listen to it or point to people to listen to it as a podcast. And I think with those logistical remarks, I'll close and I'll open the floor for Michael Scheuer, please.
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B
Thank you. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for coming. The electronic age is always with us. I appreciate the opportunity to be here tonight. I have not a long career in public speaking speaking, but I'm learning my former employer kind of frowned on public speaking. When I resigned from the agency In November 2004, another government agency was kind enough to ask me to come and speak. And they had 300 people and said, 300 people come and listen to you. I said, geez. And I was kind of, like I said, I was kind of cocky. So I told my kids, your father's going to speak to 300 people tomorrow. My son was nine, my daughter was seven. And my son kind of looked at me and walked away. Emily looked at me and began to walk away, and she stopped and turned around and she said, dad, don't worry. Sister Mary Martin makes us listen to people we don't want to listen to either. So I hope at the end of the end of the night, you don't feel like you were ordered in here by Sister Mary Martin. I wanted to talk tonight about individuals in history and whether or not men can drive or women can drive the course of history to some extent by looking at what Osama bin Laden is up to, or was up to in the past tense. Now, rather thankfully, to begin tonight, I would ask you to imagine that you're an eminent lawyer preparing to argue a case before Britain's highest court, and also to imagine that because you are a confident, experienced, distinguished and usually successful lawyer, you decide to enter the court and present your argument without having troubled yourself to look up, read and then study all of the written materials pertinent to the case. Indeed, so confident are you of prevailing that you do not even read the materials prepared for you by your team of legal clerks. Now, this scenario is, of course, hard to imagine. A good lawyer, after all, presumably would not enter a courtroom to argue a case without thorough preparation. Likewise, it should be just as hard to imagine that any American president or British prime Minister would make the most important decision of his or any government, that is the decision to go to war, without first reviewing all the available materials, written, graphic or oral, in order to identify the enemy's motivations and goals. One would imagine that a Prime minister or a president, no less than a lawyer, needs to know his opponents and as thoroughly as possible. And yet I would argue that the U.S. british and most other Western leaders have been waging a war against Al Qaeda, its allies and the movement they inspire, without bothering to study the late Osama bin Laden's words in an effort to absorb what the US military calls the commander's intent. As a result, come 23 August 2011, Al Qaeda and its allies will have been waging a war on the United States and its allies for 15 years. And they will be basically an unknown quantity, especially from my own experience to U.S. policymakers, generals, intelligence officers and even so called Al Qaeda experts. That this is the case is purely the result of sloth or negligence or arrogance. Because since Bin Laden formally declared war in 1996, he and his lieutenants, at least in one way, followed the model of America's victorious North Vietnamese enemies, Ho Chi Minh and General Giap. Like our North Vietnamese vanquishers, Bin Laden made sure that Western governments and people have no credible excuse for failing to understand what motivates the war that is being waged against them by Al Qaeda and its allies. Through numerous statements, speeches, sermons and interviews, Bin Laden explicitly explained the Islamist's grievances, their religious motivation and their war aims. He also helpfully provided us with the metrics used by Al Qaeda for measuring its own progress and issued terms for ending the war. Bin Laden's words, moreover, were plentiful and are increasingly accessible in English, German, Pashto and other languages. My own archive, for example, contains over 175 primary sources, numbering well over 800 pages. This is a significant amount of material, and yet the only reasonable claim to make is is that I hold only the documents that I found and certainly not all that exist. Given this body of primary sources, it is odd that so few of them have been exploited by the Western political leaders, writers and analysts who have made policy, spoken on the Bin Laden issue, or produced books meant to explain Bin Laden and what he was up to. Today, the works on Bin Laden, with a few notable exceptions, especially Peter Bergen's splendid and indispensable book, the Osama Bin Laden I Know, have been based in the main on what other individuals said about him, not what he himself said and did. These commentators can be divided into two batches. The first tends to be such enemies of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki Al Faisal, the long imprisoned but now purportedly reformed Egyptian Takfiri scholar Dr. Fadel, and the former Islamist and anti Saudi firebrand Sheikh Salman Al Adha, who now works for the Saudi regime as a professor, a talk show host and a website director. The second batch of commentators is found among former or current mujahideen who had fallen out with Bin Laden. This group is a talented and indeed a militarily veteran group, and it's worth noting that the men in this latter group broke with Bin Laden and criticized him over tactics, timing, targeting and a concern for the Taliban regime's survival, but did not become his enemies. To this day, they still view him as having been an important, accomplished and most important of all, inspirational Islamist leader. They differed with Bin Laden over tactics and targets, but their ultimate strategic goals for the jihad are comparable to what Bin Laden's were that is to drive the United States from the Muslim world, to help overthrow the Arab tyrannies and to destroy Israel While what Bin Laden's enemies and former close associates have said about him is a major resource when analyzing his thought, talents, character successes and failures is not a sufficient base of data on which to develop a well rounded assessment of the man. It is quite simply less than half the story. To accomplish the accurate task of understanding what these others say must be assessed alongside the primary source Bin Laden documents. And yet senior Western politicians, generals, policymakers, intelligence officials and authors have largely failed to do so, most often dismissing Bin Laden's words as rantings, diatribes and ravings, as if they really emanated from the imaginary madman so often described by US Presidents, British and other European prime ministers and the Arab tyrants. And sadly, this dismissive attitude is likely to be strengthened by Bin Laden's death. If Western leaders would not study the words of the man who was inspiring the West's defeat when he was alive, surely they will ignore those words entirely now that he is dead. It must be said that leading Muslim writers and journalists, especially Rahimola Yousafzai, Abdel Berriatwan and Ahmed Zaydan, paid much closer attention to Bin Laden's words and especially his knowledge of and use of Islamic history. By and large, these men have produced more sophisticated and accurate portraits of Bin Laden and since he was killed, have been quick to remind readers that his words and the memories of his deeds will continue to have an impact. Since 911 then, a score or more books have been written by Western and Muslim authors about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In regard to Bin Laden, these books have focused on his character, intelligence, leadership, talent, public speaking ability, international influence, organizational skills and modern management style. I believe the best of the books are those written by Peter Bergen, Abdel Barry Atwan, Steve Cole and Brindyard Leah. Among the rest, there are a dozen or so books by Western and non Muslim authors that have come to be categorized as essential works on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. For my own book I examined each of these books and noted the number of citations of primary documents that are contained in the author's endnotes. I have also noted where a large number of citations pertain to a relatively few documents. I did not of course have access to electronic versions of these books. My count is derived from what I'm capable of, an old fashioned line by line reading of each book's endnotes, keeping score as I went. I do not claim the counts are exact, but they are quite close to the mark and they give a clear idea of the degree to which the important primary sources were exploited. I I'll not take the time to go through the entire list, but will cite three of what are widely considered the best books about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to note how many of the 175/ documents the authors used Steve Cole's book Ghost Wars, Afghanistan, Bin Laden and the Soviet Invasion two citations that was a Pulitzer Prize winner Fawaz Girges, the Far Enemy why Jihad went global 15 citations to five documents in Lawrence Wright's another Pulitzer Prize winner, the Looming Al Qaeda and the road to nine 1128 citations, 22 of which are to four documents. This brief list, I believe, shows that despite the large body of documents at hand, few of them have been exploited by Western writers and analysts who have produced books meant to explain the phenomenon of bin Laden and Al Qaeda. And based on my own experience, I am very confident that even fewer have been consulted by Western policymakers, let alone their political leaders. The reason for this failure is not entirely clear to me, but it seems to pivot off the reluctance of some authors and almost all Western politicians to accept that in the early 21st century the Islamic religion can possibly be the driving force and key motivation behind bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and their allies and supporters. Indeed, there seems to be an unshakable presumption in the west that secularism will eventually triumph around the world and that only material gain, class interests or other non religious factors can be deemed real sources of motivation. In this worldview, religion is merely a cover for more measurable political, economic or ideological motivations. These same individuals seem even more reluctant to face, or at least to publicly state, the fact that in the eyes of most Muslims, Western policies and actions in the Islamic world are not benign and humanitarian, but anti Muslim and lethal. Finally, many contemporary historians, political scientists and journalists tend to believe that the world is shaped, moved and changed by more or less anonymous social and economic forces, be it globalization, capitalism, Marxism, or now the ubiquitous and rather silly Obamian concept of hope, rather than what, in a more realistic and thoughtful age, we're called without a positive or negative connotation. Great Men. That this illogical and really indefensible mindset should be so strong and impervious to reality is remarkable, if not perverse and especially striking today. Especially striking as we today live and work amidst the wreckage of a world wrought by Bush and Blair and markedly worsened by Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy, and the men and women who run the United Nations. The bulk of bin Laden scholarship, moreover, is extraordinarily presentist. When Western authors encounter thinking or mores they consider anachronistic in the so called modern world. They tend to default to asserting that ideas that run counter to the tenets of secularism, multiculturalism, globalization and diversity can only be held by limited numbers of medieval violence prone pseudo Islamic thugs. These predominantly secular authors, for example, hate the absence of women's rights in much of the Muslim world and so Islamists and really most Muslim males are always characterized as arch misogynists. These writers likewise hate the motivational power of Islam across the Muslim world, a power that indeed advises violence can be needed to defend the faith. And so Islamists are described as the distorters of their religion. Most of all, these writers fear any threat to the inevitable advance of progressive history and so they at times hang up their professional credentials and objectivity and become unquestioning cheerleaders in, for example for the so called wave of democracy that is purportedly sweeping the Middle east and overthrowing long standing Arab tyrannies. Their effort to bring this not soon to be attained world into being can be seen in several ways. By their extraordinarily counterintuitive prediction that Muslims will turn to a secular democratic system that is seen by many as largely irreligious if not pagan, by their support for efforts to impose secular democracy on Muslims as a means of neutering the Koran and the Sunnah and so negates and so to negate Islam's martial doctrine of jihad. The cultural feminist war on Islam recently declared by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and David Cameron is only the latest example of the Western elite's desire to make Muslims more like themselves and by their claims that spreading Islamist violence is due to such bizarre and clearly wrong factors as nihilism, the lack of gender mixing, illiteracy and the supposed ability of one now dead man to hijack the Koran from the remaining 1.3 billion of his co religionists. A close reading of Bin Laden's words would unquestionably offend the presentists optimistic view of a secular world triumphing over superstitious religion. And so they have ignored the appeal of these words to tens and thousands, to tens and even hundreds of millions of Muslims, much to the detriment of Western security, economic vitality and most of all, prospects for peace. Because many of the essential Bin Laden related books lack a thorough assessment of the primary documents, it is worth taking a look at a few of the concepts about Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Islamists that are now accepted in the west as common wisdom. These pieces of common wisdom tend to support an optimistic view of the West's battle with Islamists. But most of this common wisdom, I think, withers to inaccuracy after looking at the primary documents, the first piece simply westerners are hated and attacked by Islamist militants for their freedom and their lifestyle. In more than 800 pages of primary documents, there is no focus whatsoever on how Americans or Europeans live and think. The focus is squarely on what the U.S. government and its allies do in the Muslim world. To be sure, bin Laden and his colleagues made it clear that no Muslim state run by Islamists would look like Canada. But neither did he rage against against primary elections in Iowa women in the workplace or after work, pitchers of beer, knowing better than his Western counterparts that almost no Muslim would be willing to risk or throw away his life to end these practices. This fact is perhaps the most important takeaway from Bin Laden's papers for Western voters because it both lays bare how consistently they have been lied to by their political leaders over the past 20 years and also explains why they do not understand that the enemy their nations are facing is motivated by the impact of US And Western foreign policy in the Muslim world. And I use the word lie deliberately because the data needed to expose the lie is so easily acceptable that in the case of the US bipartisan political leadership, so many of whom were educated in the Ivy League, have no ground for claiming ignorance. Their knowingly false description of the motivation of the West's Islamist enemies may be politically expedient in the short term, but it most certainly is a lie that will ultimately lead to spiraling defense costs, domestic violence, curtailed civil liberties and unfortunately, an endless war with Islam. The second piece, common wisdom, is that Bin Laden's mind was shaped by the most radical of modern Islamic theorists, men such as Egyptian as the Egyptian Sayed Qutb. Qutb is the theorist of jihad as a Hobbesian war of all against all and is seen in the west as the principal shaper of Bin Laden's thoughts and actions. But in the corpus of Bin Laden's work there is not a single quotation from Khattab nor did Bin Laden ever mention his name in public. That Bin Laden accepts some of what Khatab said is clear. Bin Laden, however, is a Salafist, an austere form of Sunni Islam that is based almost entirely on the Quran and the Sunnah, the verified collection of the Prophet's sayings and actions to Americans. I have said that it is useful to think of the Salafists as similar to those of their own countrymen who believe that the United States should be governed solely according to what is called the original intent of the Founding Fathers. In Bin Laden's case, as long as Khatab does not stray from the Salafist view of the Quran. In the Sunnah, bin Laden concurred with him. But that is really no more than saying that the Quran and Sunnah are central to Bin Laden and most Muslims. When Khattab diverges from these sources, bin Laden clearly had no use for his recommendations, did not believe they would be popular across the Muslim world, and did not deign to even refer to him. The idea that a direct line can be drawn from Katab and other radical Islamist theorists, often heretical interpretation of Islam and Bin Laden's traditional jihadi Salafism simply cannot be substantiated. By studying and analyzing Katab and most other 20th century theorists of jihad, we learn much about the radicalizing milieu in which Bin Laden's generation was reared. But we learn almost nothing about the mature Bin Laden's thoughts and motivation. Indeed, one of the reasons the west does not understand the breadth of the appeal of Bin Laden's words is because we seek the origins of his thought and motivations and sources beyond the Quran and the Sunnah, both of which are deeply loved and immediately recognized by Muslims from Malaysia to Morocco to Montreal, and therefore lay an easy groundwork for someone speaking directly from those sources. Third, Bin Laden was not a very smart man and the Egyptian Ayman Al Zawahiri is the power behind the throne. Western politicians and writers often refer to Zawahiri, the former chief of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and now a possible successor to Al Qaeda, as Bin Laden's brain. An examination of Bin Laden's work, however, reveals no significant impact by the Egyptian on his thought or his rhetoric. Indeed, such an assessment clearly delineates how far Bin Laden drew Zawahiri away from his original positions in strategy. Before joining bin Laden, for example, Al Zawahiri opposed attacks on the United States as a means of destroying Israel, arguing instead that because the road to Jerusalem led through Cairo, attacks must first be focused on Mubarak's regime. As with Khadib, bin Laden did not quote Zawahiri in his own statements, but stood with him as long as the Egyptians stuck to the aforementioned fundamental documents of Salafism. It is worth noting that Bin Laden also appeared to have little use for self taught Islamist scholars like the English Major Khatab, the surgeon Al Zawahiri or the Egyptian Islamic Jihad's electrician turned Islamic theorist Mohammed Al Faraj. His respect was reserved for scholars who have received a formal Salafist education in Islamic universities or from private study with Salafi scholars, men such as Abdullah Azzam and Abu Mohammed al Maqdisi. Ironically, bin Laden usually did not even refer in his rhetoric or prose to the salvation all of his scholars he respected. There was really no need to quote from them by simply quoting the Quran in the Sunnah. Bin Laden was in essence quoting those scholars, but putting credit where it belongs, in the hands of Allah and the Prophet Muhammad. Fourth, Al Qaeda ism is outside the legitimate parameters of Islam and champions a heretical form of Islam called Takfirism. In Bin Laden's work, again over 800 pages, there's nothing but a thorough and unequivocal denunciation of Takfiri doctrine. He repeatedly and effectively attacked those, especially Saudi regime spokesmen, who identify him and or Al Qaeda as a Takfiri group. That said, bin Laden clearly recognized and feared the massively negative impact on Al Qaeda if the Saudis or others succeeded in making the Takfiri label stick. Bin Laden and his lieutenants seldom chose to respond to criticism or accusations from Western states or Arab tyrannies. But when accused of takfirism, he and other senior Al Qaeda lieutenants quickly rebutted the accusations. Bin Laden clearly and accurately foresaw oblivion for Al Qaeda and its allies if the Muslim masses came to believe they were Takfiris. Concern was evident in that he twice used public speeches to implicitly apologize to all Muslims for the Takfiri action in Iraq of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's late chief in that country, and to assure them that he would not recur and to publicly and explicitly order Al Qaeda members to avoid Al Zarqawi's behavior. Fifth, and this one was deeply embedded until three weeks ago, bin Laden was and Al Qaeda is running from rock to rock and cave to cave, and there is no central command and control. Since Bin Laden's death, this assertion has been disproven by the White House leaks of information they recovered in Bin Laden's residence. But US and Western governments stuck to this false story of Bin Laden's isolation long after it became obviously and publicly false in 2006 after the killing of Al Qaeda's chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Al Zarqawi's murderously Takfiri behavior in Iraq has been the only potentially fatal strategic threat to al Qaeda since 9 11. Indeed, if the US military did not kill him al Qaeda would have found a way to dispose of him, either by promoting him to a position where he would not command fighters or by killing him themselves. In fact, the relative ease with which the US Interrogators claim to have elicited al Zarqawi's location from a captured close associate is astounding, and it raises the possibility that al Qaeda directed the man to allow himself to be captured and then provided targeting data during interrogation. Aside from the very substantial but temporary damage al Zarqawi did to al Qaeda's position in Iraq and to the group's standing in the Muslim world, bin Laden's handling of what could be called the al Zarqawi problem demonstrated his indirect management style. Avoiding public disputes with lieutenants and allies was always his priority, as well as the continuing hierarchical nature of al Qaeda and its ability to manage branches located outside of South Asia. Bin Laden did not take Anzar Qawi in public but assigned al Zawahiri and another senior al Qaeda figure, a North African named Attia, to bring Zarqawi back on al Qaeda's Nantuckfiri reservation. Al Zawahiri did so in a measured but clearly pointed manner. He stressed al Qaeda's respect for al Zarqawi's success in killing Americans and their allies, but told him that he was part of a bigger whole that had an international agenda which was being damaged by his actions, especially televised beheadings and the bombings of mosques and Shia shrines. When al Zarqawi took minimal remedial action, Attia followed with a much harsher letter. It opened by saluting al Zarqawi's lethal accomplishments against US Led forces, but then harshly chastised him for ignoring the fact that he was a subordinate to bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders, demanded that his actions must complement and not retard al Qaeda's international goals, and threatened that he would be removed from commanding al Qaeda in Iraq if he did not quickly fall into line behind the directions of al Qaeda's central leadership. The content of both letters, as well as al Qaeda's ongoing rebound in Iraq, should have given pause to the authors, who have consistently identified al Qaeda as either a completely decentralized organization now isolated from its independent affiliates or as a doctrinally chakfiri organization. The White house leaks of May 2011 have demonstrated that these authors are largely mistaken and that their work has skewed the now losing US And Western military's understanding of its Islamist foes as well as the doctrine they have shaped to defeat them. Sixth, simply, Al Qaeda has failed. After reviewing Bin Laden's words, it is irrefutably clear, I believe, that he always intended Al Qaeda's primary role to be that of inciting and instigating Muslims to drive America from the Muslim world, to foment the downfall of Arab tyrannies and to destroy Israel. And not as a military machine meant to defeat Islam's enemies by itself or in alliance with a few other groups. Thus the whole concept, hawked by self serving Western politicians, that they have made Western populations safer because there has not been another 911 attack, reflects not only wishful thinking, but a singular ignorance of Al Qaeda's goals and the expanding power of its media operations. At 9 11, for example, Al Qaeda's main planning, training and operational platform was in Afghanistan. As the fifth month of 2011 ends, the group retains parts of that platform and has added viable and growing bases and in Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, North Africa and the Levant. In addition, Al Qaeda's example of hurting the United States and then not only surviving, but growing in numbers and expanding geographically has been an inspiration for continuing or increased organizational activity and or violence by Islamist fighters in the Levant, the North Caucuses, southern Thailand, Europe, across the Far East, Kashmir, parts of the Arabian Peninsula, India, Nigeria and other places in west and East Africa and in the United States. In short, Al Qaeda not only retains substantial military capabilities for a group of its limited size, but it has developed an outsized media and geographical reach. In terms of inspiration and instigation capabilities. Al Qaeda is today exactly what Bin Laden intended it to be before his death. An unqualified success in inspiring Muslims to wage jihad across the Muslim world in a struggle with the west that he clearly expected to be multi generational, an expectation that appears even more likely given recent pledges by the United States, Britain and France to impose Western values on the Islamic world and the emergence of the United nations as an engine for destroying its own member states. Seventh and last polling shows that Al Qaeda and its chief were irrelevant in the Muslim world at the end of Bin Laden's life. Not surprisingly, many non Muslim scholars place high value on the results of polling. But by reputable Western pollsters in the Muslim world, and I must say that some of it is indeed very valuable. But when the polls ask questions that are used to measure celebrity or ask personality based questions such as do you support Osama Bin Laden? Would you like to live under an Al Qaeda government? They are virtually worthless. They disguise reality and give hope where there should be little or none. At the moment. Today's low positive responses to such questions, for example, would skyrocket tomorrow if Al Qaeda attacks successfully in the United States or Israel, or when the US NATO coalition withdraws from Afghanistan in defeat. The key polling questions are the ones that mesh with what Bin Laden identified as the main motivation for jihad and with what he wanted to achieve. Questions such as what do you think of US and Western foreign policy in the Muslim world? Do you want to be governed with a large measure of Sharia law, do you believe your current government is un Islamic, has failed and or is oppressive elicit really the most informing responses? The polling shows virtually unanimous hatred among Muslims for the impact of US and Western foreign policy and for current Muslim governments, and a large majority favoring a substantial measure of Sharia in the post tyrannical government era. These results, moreover, are nearly the same across key cohorts, young and old, male and female, and those who self identify as militant and moderate. As long as the results remain high in these cohorts for protected, protracted periods, as they have for a decade, Bin Laden was on the right track for his purposes. Indeed, his decision not to use public words to build his own celebrity and instead to focus them on relenting on war aims and on inciting Muslims is nothing short of a bit of genius. As noted, none of this means that Osama Bin Laden was or Al Qaeda and its Islamist allies are ten foot tall enemies. Although Bin Laden himself, I believe, was a world changing individual, the proverbial great man. Indeed, Bin Laden, in life and perhaps yet in death, provides haunting contemporary proof that history is made and changed, for better or worse, by individuals and ideas and not by anonymous social and economic forces. Indeed, with any kind of manly Western response, both Bin Laden and Al Qaeda could have been eliminated at almost any time between their declaration of War in mid-1999. That of course did not happen, mostly because of the inferior and timid quality of Western political and military leadership. What a reading of the primary Bin Laden documents does suggest, however, is that 15 years into the war Bin Laden initiated, the West's understanding of its Islamist enemies and their goals is at best marginal, because its political leaders have failed to read what he and other Islamist leaders have said, because they refuse to accept that their motivation is what they say it is, and because, excuse me, they do not recognize that those men intend to try to do what they have said they will do. This reality is troubling, as there is no doubt that the us, British and other Western intelligence services have for more than 15 years provided their elected leaders and civil servant superiors with detailed analyses of the rhetoric of bin Laden and other insurgent leaders. It is also certain that these analyses surely contradict the popular the hate us for our freedom, not our actions mantra so often stated by political leaders and supported by their civilian and military advisors. And in death as in life, Bin Laden will be blessed by the enemies he chose. Just last week, Barack Obama outbushed George W. Bush and the neoconservatives by calling for regime change in no less than six countries. Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and Iran and Palestine. Six by redeclaring Hillary Clinton's rather bloodthirsty cultural feminist war on Islamic by announcing that he would ignore the sovereignty of regimes he deems unworthy of Western respect, and with British Prime Minister Cameron, by pledging to use force whenever they believe US And British interests and values come together. When you look for Al Qaeda's most indispensable recruiting sergeants today, you need look no further than individuals named Obama, Clinton, Cameron, McCain and Sarkozy. Thinking back nearly 90 years, the west last made this kind of deliberate error when it failed to read, but readily scorned and ridiculed the published words of a highly decorated but then jailed former corporal in the Kaiser's army. Now, as then, it would be wise to follow the timeless guidance of another man who intended, and indeed who came closest to destroying the United States. The better rule, Robert E. Lee once noted, is to judge our adversaries from their standpoint and not from their own. And it is always proper to assume the enemy will do what he says and what he should do. Thank you very much. Thank you.
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A
All right, so that leaves us about 45 minutes for Q and A, depending on the number of questions we get. I suggest that we perhaps collect a few of them at a time. All right, first, I'd like to abuse Chairman's privilege as the first question as. And that is, I found the bit on the Salafi orientation of bin Laden very interesting because that's probably the one aspect of Islamic militancy that I know the best because of my own exposure to Saudi Arabia. And my impression is also that they're very close to a Wahhabi Salafi reading of the original text of the theological doctrine, and that they're much less innovative than the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, with which. With conceptual innovations like God's sovereignty on earth, Hakimi, and all those types of things that you don't find in the Quran. But nonetheless, aren't there a few select, specific innovations in which they deviate instrumentally from mainstream doctrine, particularly as regards the rules of engagement in war, and particularly Maqdisi's innovations regarding when you can attack whom under which circumstances. And isn't the indiscriminate attack on civilians, although it's a fairly specific technical issue, isn't that, strategically speaking, a very big deviation from the mainstream corpus of Islamic thought?
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B
I think it is. But I have not yet seen Al Qaeda endorse indiscriminate attacks on civilians, except for Zarqawi, and even Al Maqdisi denounced him.
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A
I'm just thinking of 9 11.
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B
Well, I, you know, I disagree with. I think those are perfectly. The 911 targets were perfectly legitimate military targets as defined by the United States and his allies in World War II.
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A
Okay.
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B
You know, the attack on the World Trade center was clearly an attack on the US Economy. The Pentagon was clearly an attack on the military might of the United States. I find it embarrassing for us who invented that kind of warfare, to be whining about it at this slate dating.
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A
All right, so the floor is open and I'll just randomly start collecting. I start on the right flank. Please. Sir, Can you go into a little bit more detail as to why you.
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B
Think it is Western leaders are willfully misrepresenting bin Laden's words and intentions.
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A
We haven't had that many hands up yet.
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B
So I think we can go one by one. I can only speak for the United States, but it's easier to scare people than to confront them with the fact you've been lying to them for 40 years. No American politician until there's another calamity in the United States is going to stand up and say, you know, one of the problems here is we've been criminally negligent in not doing anything about energy policy since the first, first embargo in 1973. And so as a result of that, we have to protect the Saudi police state because it produces oil and because it buys our debt. No one in the United States is going to stand up and say, listen, whether you support Israel or not, it's a cancer on our foreign policy. And that's just a fact. You can argue about whether the support should continue or not, but that. I think Osama would have called that a martyrdom operation for a US Politician. It is just impossible for a US President to stand up and tell the truth on these issues. It's much easier to say that if we don't fight these people, your daughters are going to have to wear burqas to school or they're going to blow you up because you go to McDonald's or they really hate those early primary elections in Iowa every four years. So at least in the United States, it is a matter of political expediency and political cowardice. And it also takes advantage of the difficulty of the American people trying comprehending that anything they do overseas is not benign and humanitarian. So it is a desperately unhappy situation because we're fighting largely an enemy that doesn't exist. If we were fighting somebody that wanted to kill themselves because we have primaries, it wouldn't even rise to the level of a lethal nuisance. I can't speak to Britain in Canada, I live there. And the refusal to talk about Israel and support for Arab tyrannies is another is very strong there also.
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A
All right, front.
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B
Thank you for your talk, sir. My question was given that you've argued.
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A
That Osama Bin Laden fulfilled a central command and control function for different Al Qaeda branches, I wondered what you thought the effects of his death would be and also what the effects of the items that your old colleagues are probably having a great time looking at recovery from his compound.
- [44:36]
B
I think that what we found was that not that he was in direct command and control, but the organization itself was in contact with each other. I think as always, bin Laden was an odd combination of a 7th century theologian and a 21st century CEO. He set the themes, he set the targets and he generally allowed the men on the ground to take, he delegated authority to them. What they're finding in the House is certainly that they've been wrong for a long time, at least the policymakers. By saying that these branches are independent and actors without any influence back from the core group. I think they're probably finding that there are contacts not only back to the core group but between branches, between the Iraqi group and the Yemeni group and certainly the group in Somalia. What they're finding, what they haven't found is interesting to me or at least what hasn't been leaked. They have said publicly there is no information about an immediate threat. And in terms of Al Qaeda's own organizational capabilities and arrangements, it's very likely that that would not be information that Bin Laden kept with him. The other things that the other thing that's interesting is they haven't spoken at all about sources of money. I suspect it means one of two things. The sources weren't there or they were there. And our so called Islamic allies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and the Emirates were still pumping money into Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
- [46:24]
C
So you mentioned the Taliban. And I think that part of the dynamic is that there just seems to be a clash of worldviews between Osama bin Laden, who's in some senses transnational and is deeply, deeply committed to his own theories to the extent that he's transnational, whereas the Taliban have always been a great deal more localist. I mean, very, very localist interpretation of their own views. And I guess I would like to hear you talk maybe a little bit more even from the sources, about how Osama bin Laden thought about his allies in the mujahideen, who were a great deal less religiously minded, were a lot more grounded in that particular dynamic that's still going on today with the fight, with the war in Afghanistan.
- [47:20]
B
I think that's certainly true. Bin Laden was unhappy that the Taliban did not develop a more. A broader worldview, although I would argue that certainly since 2001, they have developed very much, at least an interest in advertising what they're accomplishing. Before 9, 11, Mullah Omar and his boys kind of thought that journalists were Satan and these computers and things were evil. And now they have a very effective communication system, media production, websites in different languages. And also I would argue that in a sense, their harboring of Osama bin Laden and their refusal to turn him over kind of turned their heads because they became prominent across the Muslim world as people who weren't just localists, but really regarded this man as a mujahid who needed to be defended. And so I entirely agree with you. Next to Americans, Afghans are as insular as they can come. But I always think that no matter where things happen, there's mission creep. And the longer this goes on, I think the longer the Afghans, the more likely the Afghans are to be a little bit more externally minded. And certainly you can tell from their rhetoric they're very proud of being regarded as the protector of the great Mujahed, if you will, and also the defeater of the second superpower. Bin Laden's view of Mullah Omar and to the Taliban was they were a very essential part of his international plan because it gave the Ummah a piece of land led by an Islamic leader from which to start the caliphate. It's clear that Zawahiri always favored Iraq over Afghanistan, but bin Laden really was happy with Afghanistan. I think they're also with other Afghan groups, Gulbuddin, Hekmatyar's group and Haqqani. Those people are much more internationally connected, at least across the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. Is that. Yeah, okay.
- [49:43]
A
The gentleman in the black T shirt.
- [49:49]
D
If American apparent moral imperialism, which you talked about has caused and continues to be the problem, is the solution a reversion to 19th century isolationism?
- [50:02]
B
I think the answer is not isolation. America has never been an isolationist country. What the founders argued for us was not an intervention in other people's business. And I think that's vastly different from being isolationist. From the days after we won our independence. We were extraordinarily involved in international commerce, in science and exploration, in business and finance. I think the academics have written in the past 50 years that America was never more involved in the world than between the two great wars in terms of economic and social things. What we have seen, though, I think since the end of the Cold War or since the end of World War II and since the end of the Cold War, Cold War especially, is America becoming, seeking to define itself and its worth by what it does overseas rather than what it does at home. It used to be, now that I'm aged, that at home you took pride in what you did, whether it was an initial Medicare program, whether it was the Voting Rights act, whether it was rules to protect women so they could compete within society. Now it seems to me at least, that the intervention of Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton is the intervention of a hectoring school marm trying other to tell other people how to live. And I think that is very ahistorical in the American experience and also something that leads us into situations that we clearly don't understand. We clearly don't have a clue about what's going on in Afghanistan, for example. Politically we've never understood Iraq. And so what I would argue is that to avoid getting into these endless wars, that you intervene someplace only when you have a genuine national interest at stake. Unfortunately, today oil is one of those things. So if something happens in Bahrain, for example, that involves the Iranians will go to war to defend the Saudis. Because certainly the Saudis buy billions of dollars of our guns, but they can't defend themselves. It is a situation where freedom of the seas, freedom of the air, now that the air is so important in terms of communication and transportation, but human rights, women's rights, the kind of bloated agenda of national interests that has been developed in the last 30 years is not something you intervene to do. The idea that any US Marine should die so Mrs. Muhammad can vote is an absolute insanity and will only lead to an endless amount of wars overseas which will, at the end of the day, as the founders predicted, restrict civil liberties and change civil Liberties at home.
- [53:16]
A
The gentleman just behind.
- [53:21]
E
This is more of a trade or operational question. It's a bit of a departure from the spirit of this lecture, so I hope you'll forgive me. There are several different accounts of how much intelligence was available before Jawbreaker went into Afghanistan. The CIA SAD team, and some people are saying there was absolutely nothing, that Afghanistan was a complete vacuum of intelligence and that they had to watch National Geographic and Discovery Channel and things like that. And then there are other ones that say, like Gary Shore or Benson, who went in to strip the Stingers of Afghanistan, had developed quite a thorough network there. Which one of those is true? To what extent?
- [53:56]
B
The latter. The British and the US Intelligence service had perhaps better knowledge of Afghanistan than any other country except the former Soviet Union, because we were there for 13 years. And anyone who has worked on Pakistan and Afghanistan finds it, in my experience, a very beguiling situation. And so we had people that worked to the detriment of their careers on Afghanistan for years and years. So the idea that we didn't know what was going on in Afghanistan in terms of how they would react, again, I think our leadership still to this day doesn't understand. You know, they say, well, what can we do to get the Taliban into discussions? Well, the first thing you need to do is to realize that you believe everything is compromisable or reconcilable, and they believe that everything is a zero sum game. But in terms of knowing, for example, that Karzai was as much a Muslim as I am, everyone, everyone knew that. The idea that came out of the Pentagon, out of Doug Feith's shop, he wrote a paper that said we don't need to commit US troops at Tora Bora because the Pakistani Border Brigades are crack units and will protect the border and seize bin Laden. Anybody who has half a brain knows that the PAC border brigades are loyal nominally to Islamabad, but mostly to their local chiefs. So in many ways, I have to say for myself, when Bin Laden moved from Sudan to Afghanistan in 96, he walked right into a situation where, given a little bit more courage from our president, he would have been dead a long time ago. Because we knew Afghanistan, at least at the working level, we knew it pretty well. I think the farther we get away from 2001, the more people will say that it was an intelligence failure simply because we failed so utterly in the country. It was easy to predict, for example, what would happen with the Afghan national army and the Afghan National Police Force. It happened to the British when they were in Kandahar they trained up an army for the local governor who was supposed to be loyal to them. The first time they went out in an operation, the whole 2500 of them defected en masse. The Soviets tried to build an Afghan national army and police force, and they ran into just exactly what we're running into today, the enemy, the Taliban, Hekmatyar. The rest of them send their own people to enlist, to learn our tactics and to get a weapon to win the loyalty of or the trust of people who they're working with and then take the opportunity to shoot them down as they had have to US Servicemen and to British service people and third, to stay in place. So when an operation is run, at some point they can turn their backs or open a checkpoint. And so the idea that anything that's happening in Afghanistan should be a surprise to anyone is really fallacious. If you're talking about American actions in the Muslim world, it was interesting you could comment then on being a motivating force for bin Laden. I'm interested to talk one more comment detail about the effect of UN sanctions on Iraq, which of course were organized by the US the reason I'm stressing this is because many people who were informed at World affairs just aren't really aware of the disastrous effect that they had. Well, for some reason, we in the west don't regard sanctions as acts of war anymore. And you know, the UN, whether it's 200 or 600,000 Iraqi children that died, clearly that left a lasting impression in the Muslim world. And Mrs. Albright then saying, we thought it was worth it, in a kind of a casual conversation that was well remembered. But bin Laden himself and his lieutenants have focused on that as, you know, a sign that Muslim blood is cheap for the West. And, you know, the question is not in all of these things and policy, at least for me, the question isn't just is the policy right or is the policy wrong? That's open to debate. But the refusal to realize that there is a cost to a policy is really where we are at the moment when Obama was here with Cameron spouting happy days are here for the Arab Spring, most of the Muslim world was watching Al Jazeera and Al Arabia televise the US Congress, giving Netanyahu 29 standing ovations. So what do you believe when you know that the Congress ultimately is the funder there is. I don't understand it myself. I think anyone who any American parent who invests in an Ivy League education has to be wondering why they would do Such a thing, given the fact that our last four presidents came from the Ivy League and the bureaucracy is riddled with these people, I think they tend to see the world that they want and what they aspire to. And very often that's an admirable world. But Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton, John McCain, who is a Naval Academy guy, they don't have a clue about how the world works or how their actions are perceived. But I think you're right. I think they've declared war, further war now on Assad with more sanctions on him. But in a way, sanctions are. They don't explode. You don't see blood, there's no body parts laying around, there's no buildings on fire. People just die. And politicians are never confronted with that, for the most part. Gentleman in the very back corner. Hi, I'm Paul Stott, University of East Africa. Michael, I was interested in the extent to which you portrayed bin Laden as a religious actor. And that goes against the trend in recent years in terrorism studies and in the US and the UK where people tended to rather strip away the religious language. It's very difficult to even use the terms you had in certain companies. I just wonder how helpful you feel those changes have been in an understanding of bin Laden. I think the changes in use of language does an excellent job of pulling our hair over our eyes. We had the security advisor, the terrorism adviser to the president, for example, tell the US Media in a large meeting that we're not going to use the word jihad anymore because it has no martial connotation, but only like community activism, like Rotarians or people cleaning up the garbage in their neighborhood. And not one media person asked him if that was really true. So I think by not using language to describe things, you get a vaguer view of them. And I just think that it is the reason at least some parts of the Muslim world dislike the United States or Britain is not because we use the word jihad or any other particular word, but because we give the Israelis F16s to kill Palestinians or because we support, until recently, a set of tyrannical governments that were really. Both un Islamic and close to fascist. So words, I think the whole question of words is really this politically correct. Politically, you know, in my mind, the multiculturalists are the last people you go to for any information on anyone's culture. They are. It's a religion and a faith. It's not an analysis. So that's kind of where I am on that. Sir.
- [62:52]
A
Gentleman on the left flank there.
- [62:59]
B
Thank you very much for your speech tonight, sir. My Question is more about the intelligence community. I was wondering during your tenure at the CIA if you coordinated with ISI or if ISI had always kind of been in the narrative of being an unreliable or somewhat complicit organization with Al Qaeda or kind of what you saw, what you envision the role of the ISI being moving forward. What I think generally speaking is that to ask a foreign intelligence service to do something that hurts its own country is counterproductive and self deceiving. And yet I don't know about Britain or other countries, but the working assumption in the United States government under both parties is that if it's our interest, it's their interest. Pakistan was extraordinarily helpful after 911 in catching people like college Sheikh Mohammed Taufiq Binytash in their cities. It was in their interest to do that. To expect them ever to have picked up or killed or given to us Osama Bin Laden was simply a fantasy on our part. They're going to tell us they're going to do it, but it's so negative for them that they weren't ever going to do it. And I really think that the embarrassment or all the gas you heard coming out of the Congress, for example, was simply an embarrassment because both parties had been telling the American people that the paper pacs are a very good ally in some ways they're a very good ally. Musharraf sent his conventional army into the border areas for the first time in Pakistani history and as a result he has a civil war on his territory. What better ally could there be than someone that would undertake that effort? But moving forward, our President has surrendered, the Prime Minister here has surrendered. NATO has surrendered. They don't intend to win. They intend to have some kind of coalition government which if Karzai is dumb enough to stay, he'll end up like Najibullah did, hanging from a lamppost in his Nike sneakers. The Pakistanis now have to look out for themselves. They cannot tolerate a further deterioration in terms of internal security. And so what I think they will do, both the army and the intelligence service will try to get the Pashtun tribes on their side of the border supporting the Pashtuns, the Taliban on the other side of the border to get rid of us and to reinstall an Islamist government for a couple of reasons. First, they want to move those units that are on the western border back to the Indian border. Second, we in the west denigrate it, but they honestly believe the Pakistanis General Staff that a quiet western border gives them a chance to absorb an Indian attack and then respond to it. And third, we in the west have encouraged an enormous development of India's presence in Afghanistan. And while that made perfect sense to us in terms of let them spend their money on dams and hydroelectric instead of ours, what the Pakistani generals see is they're now in a vice. The Indians are on the east and on the West. So I really do believe that the Pakistanis were very good allies. And the reality of the relationship at the moment is they have the whip hand. We have 130,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan who cannot be supplied except through the port of Karachi and then through truck convoys up into Afghanistan. Afghanistan, as it was in the 1840s, manufactures nothing. We can't possibly fly supplies in for 130,000 soldiers and marines. And the roads from the former Soviet Union are closed five or five and a half months a year because of snow. So all the gas you heard from the US Congress about cutting relations with Pakistan, that'll happen as long as we're willing to sacrifice the viability of a field army. But if I can add one more point in Washington, in the United States generally, we have yet to escape from the Cold War. We continue to think that we can find proxies to do our dirty work for us, whether it's Musharraf or Mubarak or Saleh. And ultimately, America's fate in this war will be decided by what we do for ourselves militarily and coming to the very wrenching conclusion that our policies are leading to a disaster for the United States. The age of the proxy is gone.
- [67:58]
A
Write the lady in the brown towel.
- [68:11]
F
Thank you. Like most people, I was quite shocked to see Osama bin Laden living in a comfortable compound in Pakistan and kind of questioned why it would take the CIA 10 years to find him. Is it really that they managed to outmaneuver such a massive organization? Or was there any kind of motivation for keeping bin Laden?
- [68:35]
B
I think there wasn't, at least on the part of the agency. I think that Bush walked away from Osama because he was embarrassed, because he couldn't find him, and also because he needed the resources to run the idiot war in Iraq. But I would say to you that the real problem in Afghanistan is not that we went there, but that we stayed and we didn't send enough troops. We have 130,000 troops. About one in three are shooters. We're trying to control a country in arms bigger than Texas, with the highest mountains on earth, with about 40,000 shooters on any given day. And what do they have to do? They have to keep Karzai in power. They're supposed to build a democracy. They're supposed to re. Establish some kind of an economy. They're building a transportation and a communications infrastructure from scratch. They're fighting the Taliban and they're trying to destroy the world's largest heroin and most violent heroin industry. And in their spare time, they can go after Osama. So the whole problem stems in my mind from staying too long and not going there with enough kind of Rumsfeld's idea of the light footprint. And, you know, if we don't bomb them on Friday, they won't hate us as much because we let them go to. To services. And that kind of stuff is what the problem has been. And frankly, a lack of willingness to kill people. We send our soldiers and Marines overseas increasingly as targets rather than killers. And we live with all respect for this institution, with an educational system in the west that has educated three generations of young people who are now policymakers to believe that war is manageable with few casualties on your side, little civilian casualties, and only killing enough of the enemy to make them squeal. And I think that's as ahistorical and dangerous as possible. War hasn't changed since Caesar. And the reasons we have so many wars is because we don't understand the disaster that they are for everyone. We are ahistorical to our own fault, to our own detriment, if you will.
- [71:13]
D
Thank you. I was very interested to hear what you had to say in terms of listening to what Al Qaeda leaders have said and actually taking them, what they say literally. It reminds me of a lot of what was said during the end of the Cold War. There had previously been the assumption that there were these really labyrinthine schemes behind the Soviet Union's ideology or their plans for world domination. And when you actually went down, you went to the archives and actually looked at what they were saying, it seems a great surprise. He actually believed in what they were saying publicly, and that was a massive shock. But what I want to actually ask you is somewhat unrelated. I mean, I wanted to see what's your perception of the new administration's big outreach to the liberated democracies as they would like to see it, the end of the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. What does that actually mean? How do you think they'll actually be perceived in the Arab world? Will these, the big. The trucks of aid actually come to mean anything in real terms?
- [72:23]
B
Well, we're broke, so the chunks of aid probably are going to have to be borrowed from China or somewhere if there is going to be any. This administration is more likely than the Bush administration to cause wars and cause Muslims to hate us because their intent on imposing not democratic values just, but some, but secular democracy. Again, this is an administration staffed with people who see the world as they want it to be. And I think they're going to be surprised. They obviously, along with much of the media, have taken a very small sample and extrapolated it across huge numbers of people. How many people did we interview in Tahrir Square? CNN or BBC or the rest of them? Maybe 200 clean cut, well educated, English speaking, professional young Egyptians who talked the talk of democracy. The journalists, at least in my mind, many of them just hung up their credentials and became cheerleaders. They took this sample, they read the Twitters, they read the Facebook, and then they extrapolated it over. Top of 85 million Egyptians, better than half of whom are illiterate, which limits your ability to read their Facebook entries. So the idea, listening to Barack Obama and what he intends to do about telling Muslims how to treat women, telling Muslims how to do this, do that, how to vote, kind of dismissing in an offhand manner as kind of fraternity rivalries, the animosities between Shias and Sunnis and Coptic Christians and Sunnis in Egypt, I think they're headed for a fall. And in many ways, I think it's really absurd to believe that many Muslims will resist, will resist, will forget and forgive that U.S. and Western foreign policy in the Muslim world has been built on tyranny for the past 50 years in order to make sure we had access to oil, to protect the Israelis and to persecute the Islamists or kill them or incarcerate them. So I don't think this is going to work out in a way that the White House intends it to. I tend to think that Mr. Obama identifying himself with a guy like Mohamed Albarity makes Alberty much less viable than the Egyptian political system. The one thing Bin Laden never forgot is the power of silence and the usefulness of silence when you don't have anything to say or you don't know exactly what's going on. The American presidency is plagued with an inability to keep their mouth shut. They have to talk about everything all the time. And if you read closely what's said at times, perhaps they're not as well informed as they think.
- [75:33]
A
All right, the gentleman in the back.
- [75:39]
C
Thank you very much. Interesting talk. You were talking about Afghanistan before and you said that the basic problem was Rumsoll's idea of trying to go in with a very light footprint. I was wondering, do you think that it would have been better to go in instead rather than treating it as a war, treating it with a much, much lighter footprint, small special forces, UAVs, et cetera, as has been suggested, and manage terrorism that way rather than as in a more traditional war fighting?
- [76:10]
B
No, I don't. I think we've proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that killing them or capturing them one at a time, either with CIA covert operations or Special Forces attacks, gives you nothing but a body count. We have been rendering, capturing, killing people since August of 1995. There are many multiples, more Muslim males under arms against us today than there were in August of 1995. So the answer clearly is not more of these kind of operations that traditionally have been complements to conventional operations. The Special Forces covert action drones have never been the main tools of war. They have been complements for special operations in a conventional war. The only thing that I can think would have worked in Afghanistan perhaps for a limited amount of time is a punitive expedition that lasted 12 or 15 months that destroyed as much of the Taliban and Al Qaeda as we could and then gotten out with the full knowledge that we might have to do it again at some point. The problem was not that we went to Afghanistan, but we went too light and we stayed too long. And Afghanistan is not a place where the longer you stay, the better you're liked. You know, Lord Roberts in 1878 wrote after he conducted a punitive expedition, he says it doesn't something to the effect that it won't please our self image. But I can say honestly that the less the Afghans see us, the more they'll like us. And I think I was trained as a historian and so when I see what unfolds in Afghanistan today is what happened in many ways to Alexander the Great, what happened to the British and certainly what happened to the Soviets. You wonder what goes on in the teaching of history in the United States educational system. Certainly when you talk to policymakers, what they want is America to be one big Sinatra. We're going to do it our way and we don't care what you think or what your experience was. I was hoping after 9, 11 that Mr. Blair would say, listen George, we've done this dance and there's only one thing that ever worked and that's in n out. But nation building took hold.
- [78:53]
A
The lady in the middle.
- [79:01]
F
Hello Michael. Thank you very much for your talk. I wanted to talk a bit about. If you could talk a bit about the death of Osama bin Laden and how this was managed, especially by the media, and the lack of evidence that we've seen, why we've had this lack of evidence and this.
- [79:16]
B
What I call lack of evidence. Why? Of what, ma'? Am?
- [79:19]
F
Of Osama bin Laden that has been shown to us. And this video that was shown of that could be, I think, any Arab man which the US Says was Osama bin Laden.
- [79:32]
B
You know, I think what we saw was a really spectacularly effective military operation and intelligence operation. And then the Marx Brothers took over in the aftermath. Three weeks later, they still have a story that changes almost every day. I believe he's dead. I believe that he's dead. The rest of it, I don't know what to think about. They've frittered away much of our advantage by leaking so much of the information about what they found in the midst of Al Qaeda rapidly trying to change all of its methods of operations, its telephone numbers. We helped them by telling them what we knew. We gave away the information about the stealth helicopters, I guess, because it made us look good, and maybe somebody else will want to buy a stealth helicopter. But the ignorance, at least the ignorance that I think I saw at the highest levels when we heard the president say, well, if we buried Osama on land, his followers would build a shrine and there would be pilgrimages. Well, if anybody built a shrine to Osama bin Laden, his followers would tear it down. You know, his brand of Islam hates shrines and saints and the rest of that stuff. They could have buried him in land anywhere, and there would never have been a, you know, Disney. Osama would not have occurred. And then burying him at sea, I don't know much about that, except I read a lot of commentators in the Islamic world saying that Muslims should only be buried at sea if they die at sea. And I think anyone who lives in the United States for any period of time to think that Obama made any sense at all when he said, well, the picture was too gory. You watch what's on our television or in our movies, and even if you were looking at bin Laden's head shot 18 times, it would still not be as gory as some weekly television programs. So I don't understand why they made such a hash out of it, but they did. But I don't think at all that it didn't happen, partly because I know the people who were involved in it, at least from the agency side, and I would trust them with my children. If I died. So I think he's dead. What the whole song and dance has been afterwards, I think you can chalk up to some incompetence, a lot of ignorance and although the President said he didn't need to spike the football, he's been on a prolonged victory lap for a long time. And you know, all of that gets you with two bucks gets you a coffee. I guess I have faith that they wouldn't lie about something that important.
- [82:35]
A
The gentleman in the very corner.
- [82:45]
B
Hi. This is actually a fairly crude question.
- [82:48]
E
But from your knowledge of the organization.
- [82:52]
B
What'S going to actually be happening now in Al Qaeda, how are they reacting to this and what are they going to be doing for the next few years? Well they won't be happy about it. I think that's obvious. That and I don't mean to be flipped there but it's always better to go with the horse you have been running with for a long time. Bin Laden, I guess unfortunately for them and fortunately for us was really kind of a sui generis person. As far as we know his particular set of credentials made him almost a Robin Hood figure. The billionaires kid who ended up being wounded in battle four times. His command of Arabic was even by Bernard Lewis who is extraordinarily one sided in his views. I think was quoted as saying almost a poetic Arabic so they won't want to lose him. But they did. What's going on now has been described I think in some of the British papers and at home also as kind of a power struggle within Al Qaeda. I tend to doubt that it's not comfortable to hear but within the councils of these groups, the Shura Councils, the consultative councils, there is a tremendous amount of small d democracy. And what they're doing at the moment is talking about who's going to take over, what the succession plan is after whoever takes over and trying to decide what goes on. Now my own hunch, and that's all it is, is I haven't seen really any real confirmation that this Egyptian special forces colonel named Alatl was named interim commander. But he might have been, I suspect we'll see Zawahiri take over in the short term for a short time. But he's a very disrupting individual. He's very abrasive, very conscious of being an Egyptian and making sure everyone knows that Egypt has been there for four millennia, not a good organizer. And the fact is Al Qaeda has a very excellent next generation coming. Two people in particular, a Libyan named Abu Yaha who was an insurgent commander escaped from the American prison at Bagram, but also is a doctorate in Islamic theology and a fellow down in Yemen who commands that group, a guy named Abu Wahashi, who is also a commander, was Bin Laden's personal secretary and escaped from. Also escaped from prison, which has a certain cache to it. What will they do in the next years? I think what they have been doing, expanding in the regions where they are, but most of all trying to take advantage of the chaos that we are cheerleading in the Muslim world. Most organizations, no matter if they're small or large, have an advantage in a time of chaos and uncertainty. Whether it's the Muslim Brotherhood or Al Qaeda or any other group. You know, it's glib to say, but remember how small the Bolsheviks were and took advantage of the chaos in Russia. So I think what we'll see is them trying to expand their organization. We certainly have seen them putting people on those boats that are coming out of Tunisia and out of Libya to get to Europe amongst crowds of refugees. And I think we'll continue to see a focus that began three or four years ago on inciting Muslims in the English speaking world. It's not a coincidence that they went out of their way to recruit four or five Western or British, United States and Canadian born Muslims to assume management of media operations directed at the English speaking world. So I think we'll see more of that. All right.
- [87:08]
A
I think that is actually the, the right point at which to end that kind of broad, forward looking question. It really rounds it off brilliantly. Everyone else who wants to ask Michael Schawer questions has to buy a book outside and then queue here for the signing.
- [87:24]
B
That's very kind, but not necessary.
- [87:27]
A
So I believe that the table is just. The table with the book sales is just outside. And I'm sure you'll join me in thanking Michael for a very similar.
- [87:36]
B
Thank you all very much.