PREVIEW: SPECIAL EDITION - What happened to al-Qaeda? Will Kaback interviews American journalist Graeme Wood.

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2:02Listen at Schwab.com slash Washington Wise. Hello and welcome to the Tangle Podcast. This is senior editor Wilkay back. It's been nearly 25 years since the attacks on September 11th, 2001. Virtually all of the leadership of Al Qaeda that planned and orchestrated the attacks have now been killed, but the group remains in tax today and in some ways is as widespread as it's ever been. If you talk to national security and terrorism experts, they'll offer wildly different assessments of how strong and how much of a threat Al Qaeda still poses. Graham Wood is an American journalist and a longtime writer on the Middle East terrorism and political Islam, whose reporting has frequently explored issues related to terrorism and

3:07the 9-11 attacks in Al Qaeda. Here this month he published a piece in the Atlantic with a simple provocative title, what happened to Al Qaeda. In it, Wood explores competing views of whether the organization was strategically brilliant, catastrophically incompetent, quietly resurgent or simply no longer the force it once was. I wanted to talk to him to dig deeper into this question and to hear his thoughts on what Al Qaeda's trajectory reveals about America's response to terrorism, the unintended consequences of US foreign policy and the difficulty of knowing when a seemingly diminished threat is genuinely gone. So here's my conversation with Graham Wood. Graham thanks so much for joining the show. It's a pleasure to be with you.

4:08So for our listeners who are not familiar with your work, could you just start off by giving this a little bit about your background and what your coverage beat is at the Atlantic? Yeah, I sort of came of age during the 9-11 era I graduated from university right when the attacks happened. And so when I became a journalist it's really defined my professional life and in a way, all of our degrees as Americans. So at the Atlantic I've covered a lot of different things, everything from professional wrestling to meteorology. But the thing that I've really kept on coming back to is geopolitics, especially the geopolitics of the Middle East and different types of terrorism that have been associated with that topic. I know you have traveled the world in the course of that reporting too and that's brought you to a lot of the locations where you report from in the Middle East. Okay, and when you're reporting a story like the one we're going to talk about today and Al-Qaeda, is that one where you find yourself traveling to the locations to talk to

5:11people? Could you just give us a little bit more background about the actual process of reporting stories like this? Sure. I mean, there's two different stages. There's having a deep background of the region just knowing a bit about it, having a sense of what it's like to be in places and what people think about on a day-to-day basis. So that's the kind of deep background of reporting. And then, yeah, whenever possible, you want to find out what is happening right now. You're going to go to the place, you want to talk to the people who are directly involved in a story. And obviously with terrorism, there are difficulties with that. There's people who actively want to kill you if you try to interview them. And then there's other people who actively want to kill you, but also are really, really talkative. And so a lot of what I do is trying to sort of hit the sweet spot of going places where I can find people who are willing to talk to me and who won't kill me in the process. Luckily, there are a lot of them are very talkative. So it means that over the years, I've regularly gone to Iraq, to Egypt, to Pakistan, to some

6:17of the places where they're pretty obvious in reporting this story. We'll be right back after this quick break. Hey everyone, quick thought before we get started. If you listen to Tangle, it's probably because you're trying to escape the media echo chamber. But even when you read broadly, it's hard to see which stories are being emphasized and which ones are being ignored. This episode is brought to you by Ground News. Ground News is not a publisher. It's an app and website that gathers reporting on every news story from across the political spectrum and shows you each outlets bias rating, factuality rating and who owns it. It's more than just an aggregator. It gives you context on every perspective in one place so that you can make up your own mind. For example, a recent story about a bipartisan border deal collapsing was covered by 50 plus outlets. One left leaning headline read, GOP sinks border deal under Trump pressure while right leaning one said Democrats blocked stronger border enforcement.

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9:26attacks. To set the scene, what motivates reporting a story like this on this topic? Is there a hook of something that's happened recently that motivates you or is this something that's been in the works for some time that you've been thinking about, writing about talking to people about? The way that the last 25 years in national security issues in the United States have been dominated by the 9-11 attack makes it a perennial story. No matter what has happened in the last year, a lot of the way that the US government and its responses and its politics have been shaped by this means you're always having to think about what al-Qaeda is, what it's doing and how we should analyze it. Notically, though, the thing that most motivated this story was just noticing that not much has happened with al-Qaeda recently. There's, I'm sure we'll get into this, but there's a distinction to be made between the center of al-Qaeda and the kind of nerve center of al-Qaeda and then these peripheral al-Qaeda

10:27franchises, which have been very active. But the group, as it was constituted on September 11, 2001, attacking the West through a centralized and vanguard terrorist military organization, you haven't heard much from that. So I wanted to find out why that's the case and what we should make of that. And one of the established ideas of the article is that there are kind of two competing views on al-Qaeda right now among the people who study terrorism and the national security establishment. One is that the group is the shrewdest and the most effective terrorist organization of all time. That's what you write. And that it continues to be as dangerous or more dangerous than ever today. And then there's this alternative perspective that the group has actually been quite impotent and has essentially failed repeatedly since September 11th and is a much, much weakened version of itself today. Could you walk me through in a little bit more detail those schools have thought and then maybe a little bit about where you yourself land on that question?

11:29Yeah. Here's the first one. The idea that al-Qaeda is as strong as ever, maybe more dangerous than ever. First of all, you have to just first notice that it's been attacked relentlessly over the last 25 years by the strongest government, the strongest military in the world. And it still exists. This is just an amazing accomplishment for a terrorist group. If you look and compare it to other terror groups, the fact that it has survived in any form whatsoever is an extraordinary accomplishment. Let alone the fact that it continues to in a way dictate by reaction the politics of the United States and the region. So wow. The other thing to notice about al-Qaeda in the argument that it's more relevant and dangerous than ever is that there's a bunch of different groups that have taken over a large swaths of Africa, for example, that are loyal to al-Qaeda. They have formal obligations to al-Qaeda center and they control places like large portions

12:33of the Sahel, the desert tea area of West and North Africa. Shabab, the Somali affiliate, has thousands and thousands of men at arms, lots and lots of money. This is something that Ben Laden didn't have in September 11, 2001. He banned the 9-11 operation with about $500,000, which is a tiny fraction of what this Shabab has running through its accounts on a regular basis. So, all of that suggests that al-Qaeda is strong and has really done very well for itself over the last 25 years. So, now, the other point of view is remarkably opposite to the one that I've just articulated. And here's the argument for the position that al-Qaeda is weak, maybe even non-existent right now. I made that distinction earlier between the core of al-Qaeda center and what al-Qaeda is and the periphery.

13:35The people who would argue that it's weak would say that the periphery just doesn't have very much to do with al-Qaeda anymore. They're waving around banners that are al-Qaeda banners, but these people do not really have an operational basis to coordinate what they do to the commands that come from al-Qaeda center. They also point out that although al-Qaeda center probably still exists in some form, it doesn't exist in much of a form. The guys who are left, the senior al-Qaeda guys, are thought to be in Iran right now. And we can go into why that's the case. But to be within another state, especially a Shiite state, and remember al-Qaeda is a Sunni terrorist group, means that they are in something between house arrest and under the patronage of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And if you're a terrorist group and nobody can really tell whether you're actually

14:39being run by a foreign organization that's not part of your ideology, then you're not very strong. And if people are interested in fighting against America, they're less likely to go to you because they don't know if it's you that they're going to or an Iranian intelligence agent who's running your podcast. So all of that suggests that al-Qaeda is not doing that well. The final thing that I think point out is that the roof is kind of in the pudding. If you asked Bin Laden what he wanted to happen over the course of the next 25 years, he would say, practically, there should be a lot of terrorist attacks in the United States. That didn't happen. Every attempt to kill people in the United States that was orchestrated, directed, and run by al-Qaeda center basically failed with the exception of one Pensacole, Florida, in 2019. The other thing he would say is that he's got a political goal which is to get the United States out of the Middle East and away from the business of supporting Israel.

15:42And neither of those things have happened either. So by those lights, al-Qaeda is not only weak and ineffective, it's simply on its own terms failed over the last 25 years. It would completely be different views, the first one, the second one, about how al-Qaeda is going. Yeah. On the point of Bin Laden as well, one of the experts that you talked to in the article shares details that we've gotten from documents from the compound where he was killed, where he suggests that he thought the 9-11 attacks would produce or he hoped they would produce a kind of Vietnam war protest type response in the United States, where the United States citizens would rise up protest against the government and force them to pull out of the Middle East. It's really interesting to read that in retrospect and obviously that was the polar opposite of what the US actually did in response. But what does knowing that about Bin Laden's calculations and the ways in which he was really wrong in so many estimates in orchestrating these attacks?

16:45What does that really tell us to you think about the group today? Does that have barren on its trajectory today? Hey everybody, this is John, Executive Producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest episode. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and send up for a newsletter subscription or you can send up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode as well as ad-free daily podcast, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews and so much more. Most importantly we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offering so stay tuned. I will join you again for the daily podcast. For the rest of the crew this is John Maul signing off.

17:46Have a great day, yo. Peace. Our Executive Editor and Founder is me, Isaac Saul and our Executive Producer is John Maul. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dune Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzvin with Senior Editor Will K-Back and Associate Editor's Hardry Morehead and Belly Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership please visit our website at EdreeTangle.com. Hi it's Brooke DeVard, host of Naked Beauty and I want to talk about how I upgrade my hosting experience. There's a moment just before guests arrive when my home stops feeling like a series of rooms and it becomes an atmosphere. The light settles, the air shifts and then the beautiful scent of Jasmine, Rosenfig, you'll be air. It feels warm and considered. That's what Pura does. It turns fragrance into environment.

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