The Longest War (90 page)
Authors: Peter L. Bergen
PBS Frontline, “Obama’s War” (2009); “Bush’s War” (2007); “The Dark Side” (2006); “Chasing the Sleeper Cell” (2003); “Campaign Against Terror” (2002); “Gunning for Saddam” (2001); “Loose Nukes” (1996).
N
o book is an island, and this one certainly wasn’t. Katherine Tiedemann worked on all phases of this book: performing and organizing research, making important editorial suggestions, fact-checking and footnoting all of the material, and doing photo research. It was my good fortune to have found someone as smart and well-organized as Katherine to work on this book and to have worked with every day for the past three years at the New America Foundation. Katherine is going on to do her Ph.D. in political science at George Washington University and has a very bright future ahead of her.
The New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., has been my home for almost a decade and I’m grateful to Steve Clemons for bringing me on board. And I am especially lucky to work there with Steve Coll, who read a draft of this book and made some typically acute suggestions about how to improve it significantly. It is a privilege to work with Steve whose smarts and self-effacement are legendary in a town that rarely sees much of those qualities in combination. Thanks also to my other New America colleagues: Brian Fishman, who had helpful feedback on the manuscript, and Patrick Doherty, whom I work with every day on some of the issues that are discussed in this book. And thanks to Simone Frank, Danielle Maxwell, Andrew Lebovich, Matt Caris, and Christina Satkowski.
Ken Ballen, a leading pollster in the Muslim world, read the manuscript not once but twice and had many important suggestions about how to improve it. Similarly, the security expert Andy Marshall made key editorial observations about how to conceptualize the book. The financial historian Liaquat Ahamed and his wife, Meena, also made helpful suggestions about the manuscript. Karen Greenberg at New York University’s Center on Law and Security had useful ideas about improvements to the book and has been a great supporter. Karen’s annual counterterrorism conference at La Pietra in Florence is a constant source of new ideas and connections. Thanks also to Stephen Holmes at NYU.
Some of the reporting for this book first appeared in
The New Republic
. I am grateful to editor Franklin Foer for that opportunity. The magazine’s executive editor, Richard
Just, made my pieces much better and had some excellent ideas about improvements to this book. Meaghan Rady Pesavento, a former student of mine at Harvard, took time out of her busy life to read the manuscript and had a host of ideas about ways to sharpen the manuscript.
Thanks to Jane Mayer, Lawrence Wright, and James Riesen who looked over the manuscript and whose work in the field, along with Steve Coll’s, has been foundational. Thomas Hegghammer, a leading scholar of jihadism, reviewed the manuscript as did Stephen Tankel, an expert on jihadist groups. Gary Ackerman, an authority on the intersection between terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, reviewed the chapter on WMD. I’m very grateful to all of you, while any errors of fact and interpretation remain, of course, my own.
Some of the reporting and ideas for the book took shape while collaborating with other writers, in particular Paul Cruickshank and Katherine Tiedemann, and also Laurence Footer, Michael Lind, Swati Pandey, Alec Reynolds, and Sameer Lalwani. Thanks to you all. Additional thanks to Richard Clarke, who solicited two papers on terrorism for the July 2008 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and to Brian Fishman—then at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center—for commissioning a chapter in the 2008 publication
Bombers, Bank Accounts, and Bleedout: Al-Qa’ida’s Road In and Out of Iraq.
Thanks also to all those who agreed to be interviewed for the book. Some of those who were interviewed are leading writers, scholars, and practitioners in the field whose work has been influential on mine, and many of whom have helped me in a myriad of other ways. Their names can be found in the list of interviewees on pages 353–356.
Thanks to Joel Rayburn and Emma Sky for your hospitality and insights in Iraq. In Afghanistan, thanks to Khalid Mafton, Yusuf Masoud, Hamid Hamidullah, and the staff at Gandamack Lodge and in particular to Peter and Hassina Jouvenal. Peter and Richard Mackenzie were my guides on my first trip to Afghanistan in 1993; thanks to you both for almost two decades of friendship. In Pakistan, thanks for repeated help over the years to Rahimullah Yusufzai, Ismail Khan, Jamal Ismail, Imtiaz Ali, and Declan Walsh. Thanks for the hospitable welcome and insights I was given in Saudi Arabia by Khaled Batarfi and Saad al-Jabri. In Egypt thanks to Reem Nada for your help on and off over the past decade. In Milan, thanks to Leo Sisti for your sage advice, and in London to Mohammed al-Shafey for your help.
I have worked at CNN in one capacity or another since 1990 and am grateful to continue to work there today with so many of its excellent reporters, executives, producers, and editors—in particular, David Doss, Kathy Slobogin, Cliff Hackel, Ken Shiffman, Pamela Sellars, Rick Davis, Richard Galant, and Steve Turnham. A special thanks to Charlie Moore, Anderson Cooper, and Phil Littleton for the various trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan we have taken in the past several years. Thanks also to Henry Schuster, now at CBS’s
60 Minutes
, who has been a friend and colleague for a decade and a half.
Thanks to Carsten Oblaender of Storyhouse Productions with whom I have worked on four intellectually stimulating documentaries about various aspects of the “war on terror.” And thanks to producer Simon Epstein who helped me to better understand the world of IEDs. And at Discovery thanks to Bill Smee, Ed Hersh, and Ron Simon. Some of the reporting for this book first took shape in a number of different magazines and newspapers. Thanks to Cullen Murphy at the
Atlantic
, Paul Glastris at
Washington Monthly
, Adam Katz at
The Nation
, Gideon Rose at
Foreign Affairs
, Marie Arana, Warren Bass, and Jonathan Pomfret at
The Washington Post
, David Shipley and Tobin Harshaw at
The New York Times
, Bobby Ghosh at
Time
, David Goodhart at
Prospect
, Will Dana at
Rolling Stone
, and Monika Bauerlein at
Mother Jones
. At
Vanity Fair
, thanks to Graydon Carter, Chris Garrett, Wayne Lawson, and Cullen Murphy for taking a continuing interest in my work on al-Qaeda.
In addition to those reporters acknowledged elsewhere in this book, the work of the
following was especially helpful in reconstructing the events of the “war on terror”—at the
New York Times
: Mark Mazzetti, Scott Shane, Eric Schmitt, Pir Zubair Shah, Jane Perlez, Peter Baker, Carlotta Gall, C.J. Chivers, Dexter Filkins, Alissa Rubin, Jeffrey Gettleman, and David Rohde, and at the
Washington Post
: Craig Whitlock, Joby Warrick, Sudarsan Raghavan, Karen DeYoung, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Peter Finn, Barton Gellman, Walter Pincus, Dana Priest, and Bob Woodward.
Teaching graduate students at Harvard and at Johns Hopkins University has been instrumental in helping to form my thinking about the “war on terror.” Thanks to Juliette Kayyem for introducing me to Ash Carter at Harvard’s Kennedy School and to Ash for hiring me to teach a class there in 2008. A particular thank you is due to teaching assistant Hope LeBeau without whom I could not have taught the class. Thanks also to all the students in that class. Also thanks to Sunil Khilnani, who hired me to teach at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins in 2003, and to the students I have taught there over the years.
Thanks to Bruce Hoffman for involving me in his scholarly journal,
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism
and for our work together for the National Security Preparedness Group, and to its co-chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, and director Michael Allen. And thanks to Susan Glasser, Blake Hounshell, and Rebecca Frankel of
Foreign Policy
for their collaboration on the AfPak Channel. And thanks to Katherine Tiedemann for her key work on that project. Thanks also to Marin Strmecki of the Smith Richardson foundation, Nancy Chang of the Open Society Institute, and Barmak Pazhwak of the United States Institute of Peace for their funding of our counterterrorism work at the New America Foundation.
Thanks to Chris Clifford of Keppler Speakers, Clark Forcey, and Steve Sadicario of NS Bienstock for their advice and help over the years. Thanks also to Shaun Waterman, Eason Jordan, Walter Purdy, Gregory Saathoff, Brent Stirton, Tim Hetherington, Scott Wallace, Richard Parry, Gina Bennett, George P. Luczko, Oubai Shahbandar, Thomas W. Collins, and Erroll Southers.
Thanks to Martha Levin and Dominick Anfuso of Free Press for commissioning and publishing my work since 1999. The contract for this book was signed in 2004. Martha and Dominick have waited patiently since then for the appearance of this book. In between came another book,
The Osama bin Laden I Know
, which mushroomed into a much larger project than was initially conceived. Thanks to Dominick, who edited both books and had a number of valuable ideas about how this book should be shaped. Maura O’Brien, Dominick’s assistant, was a great help. Thanks to Carol de Onís for overseeing the complicated copy edit, Tom Pitoniak for his excellent work on that copy edit, Elisa Rivlin for her legal review, Carisa Hays for her always sage advice, and Jill Siegel. Thanks also to Gene Thorp for the handsome maps and to Keith Sinzinger.
My agent Tina Bennett of Janklow & Nesbit has been a joy to work with since 2001, both as a friend and as an intellectual sounding board. Also at Janklow, thanks to Svetlana Katz.
Thanks to my family: Tom Bergen—who died before he could read this—Sarah Bergen, Katherine Bergen, and Con Coughlin—in whose house some of this book was written—Margaret Bergen and the McCanns: Charlotte (who helped to organize some of my research), Isabel and Brendan. Thanks also to all the Mabile family: Clebert and Alberta Mabile; Donnavan, Denise, Ahsly, Mia, and Reese Mabile; Heidi, Clay, Andrew, and Bella Gould—in whose house I wrote some of this book—and Daphane, George, and Ian Takacs.
Above all, thanks to my wife, Tresha Mabile. I apologize for all the missed weekends and vacations and promise to make it up. Thanks for reading this book many times over and constantly steering me away from the trivial to focus on the important, as you have done in the widest sense possible in all spheres of life. This book is dedicated to you with admiration and with love.
Abdulmutallab, Umar Farouk,
209
,
304
,
306
,
338
Abu Jandal,
19
–20,
25
,
89
,
113
–14,
340
,
348
,
349
Abu Zubaydah,
109
–13
Ackerman, Gary,
223
Afghan Eradication Force,
191
Afghanistan,
36
al-Qaeda’s haven in,
xv
—xvi,
xvii
British invasion of,
316
civil war in,
177
,
179
–80,
317
,
323
corruption in,
311
