Is al-Qaeda functionally dead — or just dormant?

0:00Anyone with memories of 9-11 will recall the pervasive fear that it could happen again. That insidious plan to turn commercial airplanes into weapons of mass destruction had caught us completely off-guard and made us feel as if anywhere at any time Al-Qaeda could do something even worse. 25 years later, the terrorist organization has not managed anything close to the scale of the 2001 attacks. But why? From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. Experts can't agree on whether Al-Qaeda has been rendered incapable of so much destruction, or has simply been lying in wait, holding its fire as its enemies grow complacent, the better to shock and intimidate us all over again. Grand Wood has been talking to analysts on both sides of those assessments. He is a staff writer at the Atlantic where you can read his article, What Happened to

1:01Al-Qaeda? Grand, welcome back to think. It's going to be back with you. You remind us sort of incredibly that since 2001, Al-Qaeda has only managed one attack that killed people on U.S. soil. I think even more incredibly, this is not widely remembered today by people who were not affected, remind us what happened in Pensacola in 2019. Yeah, there's always a fear of jing-sing things by pointing out how few attacks there have been and how this is the only one that has been successful at actually killing Americans on American soil since 9-11. In Pensacola, there was a Saudi air cadet who came legally to the United States for training as one does as part of a foreign military that's friendly to the United States. He had been in the open fire and killed three servicemen until he was himself killed by base police. We think of Al-Qaeda as in the 9-11 sense killing thousands of Americans, but the best they've

2:02done since is to claim three lives tragically, but just three in Pensacola in 2019 and an attack that almost nobody remembers. Yeah, and before that incident, there had been a couple of other targets after 9-11 on US soil and they came to nothing ultimately. Yeah, I mean, these were very serious attacks, but they did come to nothing. I can go through them very quickly. At the turn of the decade after 9-11, there were two airplanes that were threatened by Al-Qaeda and in both cases, Al-Qaeda took working bombs and then put them onto the clothing, the underwear in one case, the shoes and another of bombers. And in neither case did it come to more than a fizzle and the bombers themselves being restrained in one case after basically frying his crotch trying to blow up. And then there was one other case where Al-Qaeda took bombs and put them into ordinary office

3:03printers and then put them into cargo planes. And that block, too, was foiled by foreign intelligence. In all three cases, it would have been a horrible disaster had they worked. But the best that Al-Qaeda managed was three attacks on airplanes that didn't work at all. I mean, it feels a little strange to acknowledge this, but it has to be said the 9-11 attacks were diabolically clever, executed for maximum impact. What might account for the decline in strategy and frankly, the smaller scope of the attempt? I think the main thing was that Al-Qaeda was disrupted far more than it expected to be. Of course, they expected that there would be pushback. But the main pushback they were expecting was not the takeover of the country that was hosting them Afghanistan. It was actually that the reaction would be American popular discontent with its own government. There would be marching in the streets of Washington. There would be resignations, maybe even of a president of the United States because of

4:05the anger of Americans. That's what they thought was going to happen. They didn't really have a next step in mind when it came to having a spectacular attack that would be a worthy follow-up of 9-11. You write that Osama bin Laden did not think the US would respond to his attacks by invading Afghanistan. How is it possible he made such an extraordinary miscalculation? I think bin Laden, we thought of him. I remember this period vividly when he was, we didn't know where he was. We watched how, as you say, how spectacularly successful and diabolical the 9-11 attacks was. We thought of him as a genius. It turns out he got just lots and lots of things wrong about America, about America's popular response, its military response, and just how American politics works. He was a boomer. He understood that the Vietnam War had unleashed a protest movement across the United States.

5:10We now know from some of the documents that were captured that he thought the same thing was going to happen after 9-11, that there would be a Vietnam-style protest against the government. That is just a fundamental misapprehension of how Americans respond to horrible terrorist attack on their own soil. He got the politics wrong, he got the history wrong. Vietnam of course did not actually take down Nixon directly. All of these things put together, he just wasn't the genius that we worry that he might have been. What were and are the core grievances Al Qaeda has held against the United States? Bin Laden was very clear about these things and I think it's really good to remind ourselves of exactly what he said. He was upset about. There were three things. There was American bases in the Holy Land, which is the Arabian Peninsula, and then there was American support for Arab autocracies, and then finally American support for Israel.

6:11He thought those things were the changes that would happen rapidly after the attack. He thought that he could pressure the United States to curtail its interventions into the affairs of Muslim countries as a whole? Yeah, I mean, it's really fascinating and retrospect to see because I don't think anything more illustrates how badly he miscalculated than what actually happened. First of all, Israel still unstintingly supported by the United States. The autocracies of the Middle East generally also supported by the United States. I mean, it's not as if we've stopped supporting Saudi Arabia. In fact, with the current regime there, we're supporting them more than ever. And then finally, American presence in the Middle East, I think even if you've been living under a rock, you are aware that the United States has not left the Middle East. And in fact, it's gotten into a number of adventures and misadventures in that region

7:12in the last 25 years. So pulling out of the region, no, none of these things happened. And of course, ironically, Osama Bin Laden's country of birth Saudi Arabia now has a leader who defines himself as an ally of the Trump administration. Yeah, MBS, Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, whom I've interviewed actually. There is no doubt in my mind that he is opposed to Islamism in all forms. And quite brutal in his suppression of forget Al Qaeda, even the Muslim Brotherhood and softer versions of jihadism, he has been opposed to unstintingly himself. So yeah, the country of his birth has gone exactly in the opposite direction from what he was hoping for. Of course, he even went in the 1990s Saudi Arabia even then when it was pretty supportive of Islamism abroad, had already stripped bin Laden himself of his citizenship because whatever they thought of supporting Islamism abroad, they didn't like his opposition to the monarchy

8:17in Saudi Arabia in his own country. MBS, did Osama Bin Laden understand the extent to which his plan had ultimately backfired before he was killed? You know, I think he, like all human beings, was capable of kind of revising the picture that he saw in with pros-collar glasses. So there were, I think, overwhelmingly in the documents that were captured from his compound in Abadabad. There were overwhelmingly a sense of frustration at how things were going, not having enough resources, not having people who were following him, who were following his orders. But there was also this revisionist impulse where he and some of his deputies were saying, okay, well, that didn't work out so well. Maybe it could be, we could shift and we could, instead of trying to get America out of the Middle East, make do with their being in the Middle East and instead bleed them dry while they're there. There were attempts psychologically and strategically to shift, but things didn't go that well

9:22overall and his frustration was the overwhelming emotional note in his documents. I mean, the US invasion of Afghanistan was devastating for regular people throughout Afghanistan. Was Bin Laden successful in trying to deflect blame for that invasion from his organization and its terrorist attack on the US? You know, I mean, first of all, I would say Afghanistan before the invasion was already 99.9 percent devastated. So yes, things have been horrible there since, but they're already pretty bad. Now what Bin Laden was enjoying before the invasion of Afghanistan, though, was a slow but steady rehabilitation of the Taliban so that they might actually have a international level of support and recognition. And that was completely destroyed and that, of course, led to the loss of al Qaeda's sanctuary there. He, I think, he tried to say afterward, okay, that was going to happen anyway.

10:26George W. Bush was always had his eyes on Afghanistan, so don't blame me for it. But you know, I think a lot of Afghans who are sympathetic to the Taliban, they really did not think that they really did think that al Qaeda's choices had doomed them and set them back 25 years. I mean, what changed after 9-11 in terms of the Taliban sense that it could gain some kind of international recognition and power? Well, the Taliban before 9-11, you know, they were, for most of the world, an odious group. They were extremely oppressive toward women, toward Shia and others. And so they were not well liked in the international scene. But before 9-11, especially in the months before 9-11 or year or so before 9-11, there were movements toward international rehabilitation of their reputation or at least acquiescence.

11:26Countries like China were thinking, okay, well, they do have a lot of minerals and we're just going to, if we want those minerals, we're going to have to play ball with the people who rule the place. So there was a chance that if in Laden hadn't attacked the 9-11, that the Taliban would actually have survived and slowly begun flourishing. It just didn't work out that way because he screwed it up for them too. What relationship exists today between the Taliban and what remains of al Qaeda? Well, the Taliban, of course, are back in power in Afghanistan and they are, they're not willing to openly host the al Qaeda the way that they had in the past. The Taliban are a much more worldly organization. Of course, they had the experience of 2001 and knowing what happens when al Qaeda is allowed openly to operate there. And they're not doing that anymore. But al Qaeda, of course, is thrilled that the Taliban are back in power.

12:26They're still sympathetic organizations to each other. And so there's good reason to be worried that al Qaeda will regroup there, but they can't do it in the open way that they have in the past. Have we ever had good numbers on how many people might be considered members of al Qaeda? That's a great question. You know, there are debates about how many there were even before 9-11 in Afghanistan. The number might have been as small as a couple of hundred people. We're talking about a pretty small group and that's really all it takes when you use, you know, terroristic attacks. What there is today is even more fascinating number because I would guess that the number of people who are part of the core group of al Qaeda as it was, you know, as it conceived of itself in 2001, it could be as low as in the dozens. And those people are, there's a leadership council that is known to have operated and may still operate out of Iran, but we're talking about a very, very small group of people.

13:30And if you wanted to join it, this might be the most important part. If you're like a young guy who wants to attack Americans and you want to join al Qaeda, it's not even clear where you would go these days or who you would listen to. So let's just say they've got a pretty serious HR and recruiting problem on their hands. There are external affiliates of al Qaeda that call themselves al Qaeda and are friendly to the core. And that's a whole different kettle of fish and the numbers there are much, much higher. And we can talk about that if you're interested. You're listening to think I'm Chris Boyd. We're talking today about the state of al Qaeda 25 years after the devastating 9-11 attacks. My guest, Graham Wood, is a staff writer at the Atlantic. His article about this is called What Happened to al Qaeda? Okay, so this is just such an interesting aspect of this reporting, Graham. You describe a kind of franchising effort that listeners may not be aware of. How does al Qaeda effectively grant semi-independent terror cells like the use of its brand?

14:36Chris, the answer is reluctantly. So in the beginning, they wanted to be central al Qaeda where everything goes through the home office, so to speak. But once we started bombing them, destroying their networks, they meaning bin Laden at the time. He really felt like you needed to branch out and have different groups that were on your side operate somewhat autonomously, but with your brand and with your blessing for that brand. So the different groups reached out. There was one in Iraq that was particularly evil, eventually became the Islamic state, of course, in part. And they reached out to bin Laden and said, we want to be part of your group. Can we join the club? And he said, okay, fine. Other groups have done the same. And in each case, bin Laden was pretty worried about where that might go. He was actually quite prescient in that regard because some of those groups turned out to be very disobedient, turned out to be really bad publicity too. And eventually, you know, they kind of lost

15:43control of them. The Islamic state was probably the best example of this where they just started killing people left and right. They started killing Shia in Iraq and bin Laden in one of the captured documents says, is it not enough for them that the United States hates them? They seem to want everybody else to hate them too. So it was with great frustration that he saw his own creation start giving him a bad name. Yeah. And the disobedience people might be thinking who cares if a terrorist group is disobedient. The point is that if you target the wrong people in the wrong ways, you start to lose support for your cause from people who might not ever do anything violent themselves, but maybe not look a scant at some group that doesn't. Yeah. I mean, bin Laden did not love Shia. He thought that they were apostates. He thought they were bad. But he knew that if you take little children and then you blow them up in a marketplace and then have the entire world watch their body parts, then people aren't going to like you very

16:47much. And so he told his followers, can you please cut that out? You know, we're ideologically on the same side, but we want to be cautious about how we operate. And they pretty much told him, we'll do things our way. And eventually they didn't even respond to his messages. What sort of vetting process was there to determine whether any group that wants to align with al-Qaeda shares enough of its core mission? So the number of groups that has actually been accepted by al-Qaeda as one of its own could be counted basically on one hand. So they have to first of all swear allegiance. And then al-Qaeda has to decide whether they want to accept that allegiance. And you know, again, al-Qaeda has been so picked apart by drones and by other types of counterterrorism stuff that there really has not been any ability on their part to mount serious operations,

17:52which means that they've had to lower the standard that they've had. And there are groups that really are locally focused, Somalia, Yemen, West Africa that have had the al-Qaeda brand. And then have used it for purposes that the court did not really approve of. The most famous case of this, by the way, is Syria, where on the one hand you had ISIS, which we've talked about. But we also had the other part of al-Qaeda, which turned into a current government of Syria, which meets with Donald Trump in the White House, also something al-Qaeda would disapprove of. Yeah, I mean, it is interesting to think about, you know, the idea of sort of counter-fitting al-Qaeda. You don't really have permission, but you use that name wherever you are. Yeah, I mean, a little trademark sign next to al-Qaeda doesn't mean much. That's one of the downsides of being a terrorist group. Your IP is out there for anyone to use, I suppose. So really,

18:56it's something that Ben Laden, as I say, kind of foresaw that he was so cautious, such a micromanager, that you can imagine how difficult it would have been for him to have to sign off on another group, thousands of miles away, doing its own thing, and not being subject to his unmicro-management. Okay, so you alluded to this a moment ago. The extraordinary transition, excuse me, of Ahmed El-Sharah, had been a regional leader within al-Qaeda, swore off Jihad a few years ago. He is now, as you say, president of Syria, and has built a sort of cautious, cooperative relationship with the US and other Western powers. Yeah, this is one of the weirdest stories out of the Middle East, and there have been a lot of weird stories. As you say, I'll just go back and say a little bit more about where this guy came from. This guy was a real terrorist. I mean, he was part of al-Qaeda, and in the territory that he ruled during the Syrian Civil War, there were hands being cut off,

20:00there were infidels being killed. It was about as bad as it got. What he was not was Islamic state. So he, as part of al-Qaeda, when the Islamic state broke off with al-Qaeda, actually fought against the Islamic state, and then once the Islamic state was largely destroyed, he started ruling his own territory within Syria, and as of a few years ago, actually started saying, Jihadism has not got us very far. Let's try something else. We'll still be Muslims, but we will try something else. And my goodness did that succeed. The United States liked that he fought ISIS, and with the support of Turkey and others, he eventually rolled a couple years ago into Damascus, took over the country, and now the guy is ruling in, let's just say, a secular fashion. We don't know what's in his heart, of course, but for a guy who was part of al-Qaeda, a real terrorist to become what he became is a transformation that everybody in the world watching Jihadism is fascinated by.

21:01Is he a decent leader to his own people? Broadly speaking. I think you have to grade on a curve here. The man he replaced, Bashar al-Assad, was brutal beyond imagination. And I think it's fair to say that Syria since then would not be a place that you or I would like to live in. But there's hope. I mean, people can live happy lives there now to a certain extent. And again, would we like to have a president who had just recently been part of al-Qaeda? I think no. On the other hand, the most immediate alternative was not very good either. So what would you say is the lesson of Ahmed al-Sharaf for other would-be jihadists watching this all play out? I think one thing that they see is that for years in the past, they had been telling their followers, the United States and others, they will not allow someone who has

22:05conservative Islamist principles to be the president of a country. They will fight you till the end. And that's not what's happened. Actually, when he's taken power, he's been welcomed into corridors of power in London, in Paris, in Washington, D.C. So when other jihadist groups see that, I think they think, all right, we might have to recalculate a bit here. Maybe the United States actually doesn't mind a lot of the things we do as long as we don't attack them. And if we forceware attacking them, they might even help us. So it's a, I think, a good example to challenge the narrative of al-Qaeda to see this guy be accepted. Just a brief sidebar here. It doesn't come up in the article. So if it's not something you're familiar with, we can move on. But I've always wondered in parts of the world where there are numerous terrorist groups, are there things like domestic anti-terror efforts to the, that would be comparable to like anti-gang efforts in the United States? You know, there have been efforts to try to understand al-Qaeda almost exactly

23:13through the lens of street gangs. There's a psychiatrist named Gary Slubkin, who is who has looked into this. With al-Qaeda, though, al-Qaeda has always been a really top-down organization. So with street gangs, there's a lot of organization at the ground level. And with ISIS, there was that too. With al-Qaeda, I think what you're really talking about is disrupting secretive groups that, you know, they're operating in basements, not running street corners. So it's more like a counterterrorism operation than it is. Busting a street gang that you could join just by walking up and saying, how can I be of useful to you? Where are al-Qaeda leaders taking refuge now that Afghanistan is no longer a reliable safe haven? Going back to that split between the core of al-Qaeda and the periphery, the core, as I say, they're in Iran right now as far as anyone

24:13knows. So there's a guy named Safehul Adel, who is old guard al-Qaeda, he's in his 60s, and he's known to have been in safe houses in Iran. And, you know, it's never been really clear to what extent he's been under house arrest or under the patronage of the Islamic Republic of Iran. But if you wanted to find out where this surviving leadership of al-Qaeda is right now, you probably want to look at Iran, which of course, as a kind of enemy of my enemy thing, are on their side, even though it's a Sunni Shia divide too. Now, when we talk about the affiliates, they are operating basically openly and threatening all governments and states in places like Mali, Yemen, Somalia, where they're more or less operating a state. So, you know, if you wanted to find a chief of al-Qaeda in name, that's where you'd go, and you'd find people who are doing quite well for themselves. Where are those affiliates getting the money needed to fund their operations?

25:17It's not, they don't have to go very far. If you're in Somalia right now and you want to do business, the group that is al-Qaeda's affiliate there, Shabab, they operate the country. If you want to do business, you're going to have to give them a cut. So, we're talking tens of millions of dollars that are flowing through their coffers. A lot of money and 10,000 people, too, by the way. So, that's sort of the template right now is if you're an al-Qaeda affiliate, you concentrate on where you are, what you're doing there, and you pay for yourself rather than waiting for paychecks to come in from the, you know, dozen or two dozen guys who are in a safe house in Tehran. What does any of this tell us, if anything, about the effectiveness of the anti-al-Qaeda aspect of the U.S. war on terror? You know, Chris, I think it's really easy for us to see the errors that

26:18we as America have made over the last 25 years. I mean, pretty effortlessly we can find wonders that we've made in the Middle East. I think what would, the main thing that we should know is that the failures that we've had are our own, and they're not the result of al-Qaeda having through some stroke of genius forced us into these errors. So, I mean, that, as I've mentioned, that there is this vision of bin Laden, particularly as a kind of mustache twirling genius, and that seems probably not to have been a pretty accurate understanding of who he was. But that has not precluded our being complete idiots now and then when it comes to our own activities in the Middle East. So, when we look at our own checkered history, I think we have to carefully separate our own failings from the actions of al-Qaeda.

27:18Yeah, I mean, you note in the article, Graham, a poor outcome from the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan is not the same as a bin Laden or al-Qaeda victory. Ultimately, U.S. policy did not change in the way the group had hoped. Yeah, so, you know, close of its taught us a couple hundred years ago that the way you would assess something that happens militarily, whether it's by a state or a terrorist group, is by the political outcomes that they were trying to affect, and al-Qaeda didn't get its way. So, it just didn't work out that way. And we haven't gotten our way either. These things are really tough. So, you know, when I look at al-Qaeda in America, I don't see one nimble genius on the al-Qaeda side and one behemoth that can't get anything right on the other side. I see one nimble failure, small failure, and one larger one that's had enormous failures of its own. And we can have complicated feelings about this, but the reality is that the American response

28:22to the 9-11 attacks cost many more lives than the attacks themselves. Oh, yeah. I mean, the number of people killed in the attacks, we're talking fewer than 3,000 people, which is a stupifying number of people, the 3,000 people killed violently on camera on one day. The number of people who have died in the wars that followed is much, much, much larger than that. I also think we got to remember that something had to be done. It was very reasonable for the United States to try to hunt down al-Qaeda, disrupt its network. If al-Qaeda, if that had not happened, then there would certainly have been a proliferation of other plots. So, it was very reasonable for us to go off and do that. But, you know, the number of mistakes that have happened along the way is enormous. Another sidebar here, is it reasonable to say that Israel took cues in its response

29:27to the attacks by Hamas on its people from the US response to 9-11? That's an interesting point. I mean, Israel and the United States have learned a lot from each other and sometimes have failed to learn from each other, of course, in its responses. Israel's response after October 7 was to say the organization that perpetrated this massacre must be destroyed, which has to be abrooted and we're not going to stop until they see existing. And in that sense, it's very similar to the United States response to the 9-11 attack. And as I say, not an unreasonable response. If there's a group that insists on continuing to have massacres, terrorist attacks, programs against you, then you have a reasonable expectation of the ability of self-defense. Now, along the way, there is going to be carnage. There's going to be

30:28there's going to be even in the pursuit of legitimate targets. There's going to be a lot of collateral damage. We've seen that both in Gaza and in the American response. I wouldn't want to say that though that Israel and the United States have been operating the same way for most of the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, there was this attempt at counterinsurgency, like getting people on your side and basically trying to make areas of safe haven that you could expand in the country that you've invaded. One thing you have not seen in Israeli response, there's a lot more skepticism in Israel about counterinsurgency. And so in Gaza, there's I dare say very little of that type of of effort that's been made. Graham, the US response to 9-11 did coincide with an ever more deeply fragmented domestic politics in this country. Was that a goal of the attacks? Can we say that 9-11

31:35was the inciting incident or was the war on terror the inciting incident? Oh, I mean, I think there were many different confluence as a factor is that have led to the polarization since then. I mean, I remember distinctly in the months after 9-11, there was exactly the opposite of course. There was a lot of fellow feeling among Americans, red, blue, you name it, everybody sort of banding together. So in some sense, the 9-11 attacks postponed what we've subsequently seen where Americans have found reasons to hate each other. But it is true that the war on terror is entailed, sending lots of Americans and a lot of money overseas for goals that have been kind of distant. Sometimes just badly explained, sometimes just stupid ways that have caused political backlash. So, you know, it's again, the last thing I would want to do is to say that

32:40Bin Laden saw how this was going to rip America apart. It was actually not at all as far as we can tell part of the plan. He thought Americans would sort of be united against their own government, but there's no sign at all that he thought as of September 11, 2001 that everybody's going to start hating each other because it's going to be such a mess for America, which is kind of sort of what would happen, but it wasn't because he planned it that way. Al-Khina was, in your words, mostly neutralized as a threat not long after 9-11. What do we know about why it's reputation as an almost supernaturally capable predator persisted? I mean, you might need to talk to a psychoanalyst about that rather than to a journalist because as some of the Tihadism experts I spoke to have put it the ability of Al-Khina to just live rent-free in the heads of Americans and especially Americans

33:44in national security has been quite extraordinary. As you say, the organization itself was really picked apart in the years after September 11. And, you know, to this day, if you want to be in the roots with Al-Khina, there's a really good chance that your cell phone will be very quickly, you know, exploited, your networks will be known and you will be neutralized yourself. So, given that Al-Khina has been so weak during that period, the fact that we've been thinking about it is a really extraordinary thing and maybe one of their great successes, you know, like this is a group that 25 years later still exists in some form and that still has lots of very smart people with weapons in the largest richest country on Earth thinking about it. And that is a victory of sorts for Al-Khina. I mentioned in the introduction terrorism experts are at least two minds about Al-Khina

34:45and its current state. Some see evil geniuses at work playing a very long game, some see hopeless bumblers. I love that phrase that you write in the piece. Who's right? Could they both be right? I think that I don't think they can both be right, but there is one point of agreement. Everybody agrees that the Al-Khina brands in the periphery, like in West Africa, like in Somalia, like in Yemen, are strong enduring and basically don't like America very much. There is dispute though about whether Al-Khina in its core is still a going concern, maybe even more powerful than ever and I'll quickly run through the arguments for each. The arguments that they're destroyed is that they haven't been able to do anything and they seem to be as cold-bunzel from the University of Texas told me, almost like a defunct podcast where the old guys will put out radio shows and essays, but nobody will really listen to them anymore. The argument for there being weak is that

35:50the argument for them being strong is almost the same thing. We haven't heard from them recently. We know they still exist in some form and that's pretty concerning. If your job is to watch out for these guys and you don't hear from them, it could be because they're successfully evading detection, have some plan that's in the works. But the absence of that evidence does not itself show that it's happening. It's just consistent with that interpretation. So I think both sides have some arguments in their favor. None of this effort to make ourselves safer and to make ourselves feel safer has been cheap to execute. You cite that Brown University study from five or six years ago that estimated an eight trillion dollar price tag for the war on terror. Where has that money been spent? When we start talking in trillions of dollars, we may as well just say cajillion, you know, this is an inconceivable amount of money. And it's been spent the Iraq war, Afghanistan, you know, the various adventures that we've had overseas, the amount of time that

37:00and resources that have been spent hardening domestic security, all the time that you spent taking your shoes off to get onto an airplane. That's because of al-Qaeda. We're talking about a lot of money that has been spent to destroy a group that had one extremely successful attack. And would have probably had more had we not done anything about it. But man, it's really sobering to see the the price tag for the safety that we've enjoyed. I mean, it really takes us to the question of what is enough. It's not a perfect comparison because like a fire in my home is presumably not going to be started by an arsonist, but I have smoke detectors and I have fire extinguishers. I suppose I could spend the money to install a commercial style sprinkler system, but it's very, very expensive and the chances that I will ever need it are pretty remote. And so I'm willing to take the chance of not having that. I mean, how do we decide what is enough money to have spent on protecting

38:02ourselves? I think, you know, with al-Qaeda, we destroy al-Qaeda and there is a deterrent effect too. Like the United States, I've felt as of September 10th, 2001, like it was in a position of great security, and al-Qaeda broke that. And I think there was, there was in addition to the desire to destroy al-Qaeda, the desire to show any other group that wanted to threaten the United States this way that the reaction would not be the one that they wished for. So I mean, I think we didn't buy nothing for the trillions of dollars that we spent. And it's not just the kind of the equivalent of a smoke detector. It's also buying a kind of political piece from any other rival that we might face. I don't know, again, the numbers are so big, so inconceivable that it's very difficult to do the cost-benefit analysis here. But I do know that if there had been months and months of

39:03terror attacks by al-Qaeda or by other groups that we would be talking about those right now instead of talking about whether we paid too much for the safety that we had. We started to eliminate al-Qaeda leaders soon after it was established that this was the organization responsible for 9-11. You note that those who moved up in the ranks to fill vacant positions were, you know, understandably less experienced, which makes sense. You also say most at less credibility than the ones who came before them, credibility with whom. Credibility with potential recruits more than anything else. You know, to be someone who has spent your entire adult life in the path of Jihad is obviously going to make you someone who you might look up to if you're into that yourself. The people who have been replacing Bin Laden and his lieutenants have not had the decades in grade quite the opposite. They're basically nobody's with a few very noteworthy exceptions,

40:08safe, all out of the presumed current leader of al-Qaeda being one of them. Why did ISIS change the orientation of people in many parts of the world to the idea that terrorism could be a tool for power and persuasion? ISIS, you know, it grew out of al-Qaeda and I think al-Qaeda for the first, oh, let's say, and 15 years after 9-11 had people who were not exactly sympathetic to it, but open to its goals and in some cases, even its methods. And they would say, you know, I too think that the United States supports Israel too much or supports Saudi Arabia too much. What ISIS did for I think a lot of them was to say, okay, now we see where this leads. Even if we are broadly sympathetic to some of the goals, it turns out it's a death cult that will behead people left and right and who definitely we don't want to be ruled by ourselves. So I think just as Ahmed Ashara, when he turns toward a kind of secular autocracy in Syria,

41:13shows that if you go off the path of jihad, then maybe it'll work out for you. ISIS has shown a lot of people who are in the fence that if you go further down the path of jihad, it leads to somewhere you definitely don't want to be. That's really interesting, the idea that overreach might ultimately make the world safer because far fewer people are willing to countenance anything like terrorism. Yeah, I mean, ISIS was so extraordinary in its brutality. You know, I spent years just following ISIS and seeing the reactions that it got. If you went to a place like Jordan or Egypt, you could see in real time as people watched Muslims being burned alive and then suddenly the idea of an Islamic government was much less attractive because of the possibility that it would turn to something like that. So I think there was a big shift in political opinion that happened

42:13because ISIS went too far. Graham, if whatever remains of al Qaeda is not in fact imploding but quietly rebuilding its capacity for terrorism aimed at the United States, how would we know? I mean, the nature of covert action is that you don't. The good news is that we're better at detecting these things than we were before 9-11 and in some ways through the miracles of digital surveillance were way ahead of not just al Qaeda but any terrorist groups that might try to attack us. But the truth of the matter and this the sobering part is any group, not just al Qaeda, could probably do some horrifying thing that was front page news. Getting one attack done is easily within the reach of al Qaeda even in its weakened form and so it really could happen

43:15and the first thing we would hear about it was what had happened. I do worry a lot about suicide bombings are terrible but they haven't had the huge effect that many people have imagined. Drone attacks are so easy to carry out now. You're not the first person to notice that and in fact, Saif Al-Adel, the presumed leader of al Qaeda, wrote about this not too long ago. Saif Al-Adel is an Egyptian former military officer and when you read his works, you often see some of the brilliance that was lacking in bin Laden. One of the things that he wrote about was how suicide bombings were kind of a thing of the past. They were an old technology and that al Qaeda should be starting to think about drones, drone swarms, urban assassinations and also poisoning of water supplies and food supplies. It does not make me feel comfortable to know that there's a

44:16terrorist leader who has that kind of innovative spirit but yeah, it's definitely on the radar of al Qaeda that that shift away from the old technologies is something they should be thinking about. Besides continuing to plan for military action when necessary, what else could our government be doing to keep us safe? I think that most of the things that our government has been doing are the things that it should be doing. We've talked about the overreach but if I were to say what are the steps that need to be taken to neutralize al Qaeda, I would say that's probably mostly being done. But there's this other political thing that gets a little bit further and it's very hard to do, which is to remind people that one of the things that al Qaeda did was threaten our own

45:18our own political feelings. There were civil liberties that were curtailed in the wake of 9-11 and that it's difficult to say because again, you don't want to jinx yourself by saying that al Qaeda is not a going thing anymore but having a political leader say that al Qaeda is weaker than ever and we should make sure in retrospect look over what we've done and make sure that our civil liberties are respected that we remain true to our own American values. That's probably the political step that I would most like right now as opposed to any concrete step to further concrete step to keep another attack from happening. Graham Wood is a staff writer at the Atlantic where you can read his article what happened to al Qaeda. Graham it's always nice to speak with you. Thank you for making time for the conversation. Chris, thank you. I always enjoy it. Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, wherever you get podcasts or at our website think.caia.org.

46:19Again, I'm Chris Boyd. Thanks for listening.