Picking Up the Pieces

Peter L. Bergen

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002

Summary:  In three new books, experts explore every angle of September's horrific attacks. The warning signs, it seems, had long been evident. Herewith some strategies for how to read the signals next time -- and how to fight and win the new war on terror.

Peter L. Bergen is the author of Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden.

How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War. Edited by James F. Hoge, Jr., and Gideon Rose. New York: PublicAffairs, 2001, 324 pp. $14.00 (paper).

To Prevail: An American Strategy for the Campaign Against Terrorism. Kurt M. Campbell and Michele A. Flournoy, principal authors. Washington: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2001, 399 pp. $18.95 (paper).

For most Americans, the events of September 11 came like a bolt from the blue on that beautiful, terrible morning. But as Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda observe in their well-written introduction to The Age of Terror, "the unforgivable is not necessarily incomprehensible or inexplicable." In fact, all three of these books make clear that although the attacks on New York and Washington were unexpected for many, the warning signs had long been evident -- at least to some of those who focus on terrorism.

There was, for example, the report by the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (known, for its co-chairs, as the Hart-Rudman report). As several of the essayists in these books point out, in the spring of last year this commission predicted that there would likely be a catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil within the next two decades.

By last summer, it had also become clear to those monitoring Osama bin Laden that al Qaeda was plotting an attack; the only question was when and where. The arrests of al Qaeda associates in Yemen and India in June had revealed plans to blow up the American embassies in those countries, and a propaganda videotape, which circulated widely in the Middle East during the summer, showed bin Laden calling for more such assaults.

Given this forewarning, how did the attacks on America happen? So asks the book assembled by the editors of this magazine. The answers are provided by a list of big thinkers, ranging from Fouad Ajami to Fareed Zakaria. Part of the answer can be found in an essay by Princeton's Michael Scott Doran, "Somebody Else's Civil War." Doran, attempting to explain a subsidiary question -- namely, why do they hate us? -- shows that the United States has been sucked into a struggle within the Muslim world. This battle pits those, such as bin Laden, who seek to re-create the era when the Prophet Muhammad ruled the Islamic lands, against those who actually govern Muslim countries today. Bin Laden used Afghanistan as a base to launch a jihad across the Muslim world, hoping thereby to bring "apostate" regimes such as Saudi Arabia within the fold of true Islam and restore the caliphate from Spain to Indonesia. By this view, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were collateral damage in a struggle for the hearts and minds of the umma -- the worldwide community of Muslim believers. According to Doran, bin Laden hoped that the attacks against the United States would spark uprisings by Muslims against their own American-backed regimes. As Sandy Berger pithily observes in his own essay, "bin Laden's ultimate twin towers are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia."

THE REAL ROGUES

All three of these books have their merits, not least of which are their timeliness and the admirable dispatch with which they were produced. How Did This Happen? is the most wide-ranging of the three; the essays included examine everything from the economic impact of the attacks to the troubled recent history of Afghanistan. For those seeking to understand how the attacks might play out in the wider historical story of the U.S. role as a great power, The Age of Terror offers several literate and illuminating contributions. And To Prevail presents a series of policy recommendations that, although they may make the book less engaging reading, should be of considerable interest to policymakers.

It is a virtue of these three books that all of them, mercifully, avoid dragging Iraq or Iran into the events of September 11. There seems to be a desire in some quarters today to discover a deus ex machina in the plot, a way to explain the terrible attacks without accepting that they were simply the work of al Qaeda (which Talbott and Chanda aptly label "the ultimate NGO"). But scant evidence exists that any state actors -- except the Taliban -- actively supported bin Laden. Certainly, if any Middle Eastern government does bear blame for supporting the kind of Islamist extremism that led to September 11, it is neither Iraq nor Iran; Saudi Arabia is the real culprit. In its effort to shore up its own legitimacy, Riyadh has financed militant Islamist movements around the world. This policy of backing virulently anti-Western groups -- a strategy some have dubbed "riyalpolitik" -- has now borne disastrous results, from Afghanistan to America.

Imagine for a minute that, instead of being Saudis (as they in fact were), 15 of the 19 hijackers had been Iranian. Imagine, too, that the Taliban got its diplomatic and economic support not from the House of Saud but from the regime in Tehran, and that bin Laden enjoyed the backing of Iranian clerics, charities, and businesses rather than their Saudi counterparts. Does anyone doubt that if any of the above were true, the United States would have already taken aggressive actions against Iran?