 Hi, and thank you for joining us. I'm Candace Rondo, and I'm the director of the Future Frontlines program at New America. I'm thrilled to be here with you all for this conversation with Peter Bergen about his new book, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden. Although Peter really doesn't need much introduction, it's worth noting that he's one of the most accomplished journalists I have ever known. And in addition to being one of the most authoritative voices on the evolution of al-Qaeda and The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Peter is New America's vice president for global studies and fellows. And he is the head of our international security program. He is a longtime CNN analyst who has reported from the front lines of America's longest wars in the Middle East. And Peter is a prolific writer who has authored and edited nine books. And his Chronicles of America's National Security Challenges have thrice landed him on the New York Times bestseller list. It's worth also noting that Peter's book was reviewed today in the New York Times by no less than Louise Richardson, a big fan, I'm a big fan of hers. She is one of the most preeminent scholars on terrorism. So if you haven't had a chance, do check out the review and do check out the book. We need to give a shout out and thanks to New America's international security program and all the members of New America's team, as well as our partners at Solid State Books for organizing this event. You can purchase your copy of The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden through the link in the chat. And during the event, we really want to invite you to converse with us, talk with us, submit your questions in the Q&A, and you can check that out in the feature below. You can find that at the bottom of the screen. You can enter your questions there, and we'll get to your questions toward the end of our conversation. So before I get into this conversation with Peter, I just want to say that the publication of Peter's latest book, The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden, falls not coincidentally just one month before the 20th anniversary of Al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC on September 11th, 2001. In fact, it was probably right around this time that the Bush administration's national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, would have been receiving a number of intelligence warnings about an imminent attack planned by Al Qaeda, although there were not many specifics on offer at the time. It also happens that only a few years before the attacks of 9-11, Peter snagged famously an on-camera interview with Osama Bin Laden that marked the beginning of Peter's great association with trying to understand this movement and Bin Laden as a man, but also I think sparked one of the greatest manhunts of all time, which Peter has also chronicled, both in books and in documentary form for HBO and others. So what's really interesting to me about Peter's story and I've known him for a long time now, since our days back in the wilds of Afghanistan before the latest chapter of the war, I think what's really interesting about this book, Peter, is how you document how Bin Laden rose to power and sort of left the world in this kind of ignoble state in Pakistan. And I think we're gonna look forward to hearing from you a little bit about kind of how you put this narrative together and some of your impressions before we also get to the audience Q&A. So there are a lot of myths, of course, about Bin Laden. And I think you've talked about those myths in this book and I think you've done a really great job of unpacking them. And recently you had a piece in the Washington Post that, you know, enumerated five major myths about Bin Laden and about al-Qaeda and kind of, you know, what we know or what we think we know about them. Can you talk a little bit about those myths and what you kind of tease out there? Well, Candice, first of all, thanks for doing this. And Candice and I share not only an affiliation with New America, but we're also both professors at Arizona State University. And well, you know, there have been a lot of myths about Bin Laden, I'm not surprising any kind of figure that actually, one of the interesting things about Bin Laden, he's one of the few people, I think you can truly say that changed the course of history, I mean, without 9-11, a lot of events wouldn't have happened. The Iraq war wouldn't have happened. The overthrow of the Taliban wouldn't have happened. So without Bin Laden, 9-11, it's really his idea. He pushed it. There was internal resistance within even al-Qaeda to this idea of attacking the United States. But some of the myths, you know, one big myth that kind of began early on was the idea that Bin Laden was sort of a blowhard and didn't really fight on the front lines of the war. Milton Bairden, who's somebody I admire quite a lot, ran the CIA operation in Afghanistan. He told PBS Frontline that Bin Laden essentially had never fought in the war. Turkey Al-Faisal, who ran Saudi intelligence during the period of the Afghan war, made similar observations in a relatively recent interview with the Guardian. The fact is that Bin Laden actually fought whatever, you know, he's a complex figure and clearly he did a lot of evil. But one thing that he did do was fight personally on the front lines against the Soviets in almost suicidal bravery in 1987. That was documented in a couple of books in Arabic, one of which is actually probably the most useful account of that early experience. It was written by a guy called Abdul Badaji. It's a pseudonym. Anyway, so it was written by Abdul Badaji and it was written in 1991. It's a very detailed account of the Afghan Arabs, what they did in Afghanistan. It takes them at a task occasionally, so it's not a geographic and it's a very useful primary document because it was based on interviews of people who actually kind of participated in that jihad and even had access to walkie-talkie transcripts and sort of from the battlefield. So that was one myth, I think, that I hope the book at least sort of shows. It was not the case. Another myth was the idea that the, which is kind of relevant to today and Candice, many of the players on both sides of this debate is the idea that al Qaeda and the Taliban would separate after 9-11. Now, if you were a rational actor after 9-11, if you were in the Taliban, I think there was a moment, we know there was a moment and I think peace could have been made with the Taliban. They had lost completely on the battlefield. They were interested in making some kind of peace. Anand Gopal, who's our colleague, both at New America and at Arizona State, has detailed this in some, you know, with kind of deep reporting. They were ready to make a deal in the sort of 2002 time period. The deal, but the Americans were not interested in such a deal at the time. The Taliban was sort of anathema. So from a rational actor perspective, the Taliban would have rejected al Qaeda after 9-11. After all, bin Laden, who was not popular amongst many leaders of the Taliban, but, you know, Omar was always sort of rabbi as it were. We have a situation where the Taliban leadership didn't particularly like bin Laden after 9-11. You would have thought that they would have sort of, as a result of losing their regime power that they would have rejected al Qaeda, but that didn't happen. And in fact, in the Abadabad documents, which are publicly available, so anybody who's interested can look at these documents. You know, bin Laden was in correspondence with Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban in the months before he died, essentially saying, you know, the Americans are leaving Afghanistan. It was kind of a sort of buck. He was trying to sort of essentially raise the spirits of Mullah Omar. Other members of al Qaeda were in touch with a guy called Tayyip Agha, who was Mullah Omar, sort of initially private secretary, then became the lead negotiator with the Taliban and in its discussions with the United States. There's also evidence in the Abadabad documents that al Qaeda was financing elements of the Taliban, including the Akhani network, which of course, Suraj Akhani is now the number two leader in the Taliban. And they celebrated an attack on background air force base. It was a joint operation between the Akhani network and al Qaeda that took place in mid 2010, and in which an American contractor was killed when a dozen US soldiers were wounded. So the documents in Abadabad are pretty clear that the Taliban and al Qaeda continued warm relations. They did not separate. And the United Nations in June, as Candace knows, released a report which said that the relations between al Qaeda and the Taliban remain very close. And we don't think of the United Nations as a, I mean, I think of the United Nations as a pretty good independent adjudicator of these issues. So they've had a sell there, looking at the Taliban and al Qaeda for many years and they issue quarterly reports, which are, I think, pretty authoritative about what's going on. And I think this UN report speaks for itself. I think it certainly does. I mean, so a couple of interesting touch points here. I just want to mention for the geeks out there who have followed al Qaeda and Taliban and their rise and fall, and then rise again, at least of the Taliban, famously the Battle of Jaji, which you mentioned, Peter, where bin Laden kind of cut his teeth as a warfighter in the Soviet era, also is the subject of a Russian film that is actually, again, for geeks out there who care about these things, is probably one of the best films, it's a fictionalized film about Afghanistan and kind of the demoralizing encounter that the Soviets had in their final years before their pullout, a sick movie that I always love. Another touch point, Tayyab Agha, of course, there was a lot of controversy about even beginning to kind of a conversation with him because it was not clear whether he had the authority to speak on behalf of the Taliban at the time. And I remember those conversations very well internally with colleagues at the State Department as well as other places around the world where there was a lot of engagement on the negotiation process, but of course he did emerge as a very important conduit. So interesting that you were able to bring out in the book that he had these tight connections with bin Laden all along and whether or not those who were responsible for negotiating on behalf of the United States fully understood that. I don't know if that's actually clear, at least from my interaction. So I think that's really an interesting bit that you brought out in your research. But another thing that you, I think you do so well in the book that I think is new, is you kind of talk about bin Laden as the man and you get this kind of interior look at his mindset, his thinking and also his relationships with his family. How did you do that? How did you reconstruct all that? Well, the about about documents are sort of a goldmine. I mean, the real goldmine, the most useful document for that part of the story is the CIA released in late 2017 at the behest of the Trump administration. All the documents, as you know, kind of 470,000 files. Many of those files are not useful. Bin Laden was getting a lot of reading materials on thumb drives, newspapers. He was in his case of watching cartoons. There's a whole raft of stuff that isn't that useful. But there are about 6,000 pages of useful material. Nellie LaHood, who's a New America fellow is going to write the definitive book about the subject, which I think will come out in the spring of 2022. And I think we'll be a fascinating deep dive into those documents. But the key, one of the key documents was what the CIA referred to as the Bin Laden's journal. It's actually something a little bit different and even more interesting, I think, which is it was a Bin Laden family journal. The Bin Laden family as they were living in the Abadabad compound in Pakistan. A, they had quite a lot of time on their hands. And B, they knew in Bin Laden's words, he wrote, the top deputy. The Arab Spring events were the most momentous events in the Middle East in centuries. This was Bin Laden's view. But he was keenly aware that his picture, his ideas, his followers were just simply not involved in the first months of these revolutions, whether in Tunisia or in Libya or in Egypt. And he was perplexed about what to do with it. And he was very excited that on February 15th, 2011, Um Hamza, who was his oldest wife, eight years older than him, age 62, suddenly reappeared in his life. She had been living in Iran under house arrest for about a decade. And Bin Laden, and this may be surprising for people who aren't following the al-Qaeda, Bin Laden story closely, two of Bin Laden's oldest wives had PhDs, highly educated, both of them claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad, which was very important to Bin Laden to put great store and trying to imitate in his own mind the life of the Prophet Muhammad. And he really wanted them to kind of give him advice about what to say because the Arab Spring was happening without his ideas, without his followers. And yet he knew this was really a big deal. I mean, what was Bin Laden trying to achieve? He was trying to achieve regime change in the Middle East and would install Taliban style theocracies from Morocco to Indonesia. Here was the regime change he hoped for, but it was being led by liberals and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he despised or disliked because of its engagement in conventional politics. So the diary is an almost daily account of these meetings that Bin Laden hosted every night and is about a bad compound. And I want to thank Daria Awidat, who's a New America Fellow, who helped me kind of interpret what is 228 pages of handwritten Arabic. So it's not easy to translate. And of course it's sort of written in a little bit of shorthand because it wasn't intended for public consumption. The family wanted to record what Bin Laden was thinking about the Arab Spring. They wanted to advise him about a big speech that he was planning to deliver because he was conscious of two things. One, the Arab Spring was a big deal and he needed to intervene publicly. And two, the 10th anniversary of 9-11 was approaching and he wanted to make a big statement. And I think his silence over the Arab Spring is pretty deafening. Because Bin Laden released a lot of videotapes and audio tapes in the period after 9-11. Many of them, by the way, were recorded in the Abadabad compound. And in fact, we have outtakes of those videos that are now publicly available. And so he hesitated because he was trying to work out with his two older wives who were advising him and who played a kind of unseen but very important role in his thinking about what to say. And he came up with one big idea, two big ideas. I think one was that he was gonna kind of suggest that a religious council should be assembled and they would advise the new rulers of the Middle East about what to do, presumably their advice would be, essentially rule like the Taliban, which no one in the Middle East was really clamoring for at the time. And the other big idea he had, he was interested in issuing some kind of public apology on behalf of al-Qaeda and its affidets because he was kingly aware, as were many of the people in the top leadership of al-Qaeda, that al-Qaeda's brand was in deep trouble because they were killing so many Muslim civilians. This was a group that had positioned itself as the defender of Muslim civilians. And yet, so many of the victims in Iraq and Pakistan elsewhere were Muslim civilians. And the bad about documents are full of kind of admonitions to the Pakistani Taliban, to al-Qaeda in Iraq, to the al-Shabaab and Somalia, which is basically stopped killing Muslim civilians. So this was an, the Laden wanted to kind of relaunch al-Qaeda as kind of a kind of a gentler al-Qaeda around the 10th anniversary of 9-11 and he was gonna relaunch it with a public apology. So these were the kind of two key things that were on his mind that you glean from the family diary. And also from the other documents that were released from the about a bad compound. So I mean, really interesting that you have this kind of I alone can fix it kind of mentality, which is essentially, you know, the kind of the leadership style of bin Laden was such that he felt like he had the answers. And yet, what was clear, I mean, as you point out from the Arab Spring, any message that he would have sent out into the world, whether it was kind of like the al-Qaeda rebranded or in a sort of sort of softer form or something more grand as you described sort of a council, world council of religious elders would have fallen very much on deaf ears in large part because as you say, I mean, he had undercut his credibility and the credibility of al-Qaeda through the continual, you know, targeting of civilians of all kinds. And I think in some ways also lost the plot on some level in large part because of that commitment to targeting Muslim civilians in particular, but also, you know, as I think Louise Richardson points out in her review of your book, which I thought was an excellent point, you know, he just didn't have a positivist vision ever. He didn't really, he had a lot of ideas about how to topple regimes, how to take down governments, how to, you know, address these kind of injustices and grievances, but no positivist vision. And I think, you know, I have to say, he shares that in some ways and al-Qaeda shares that in some ways with the Taliban. And I, you know, some might argue otherwise. I think we can get into a very hardy debate. I'm sure we're gonna hear from the audience about that. But the Taliban have always been split, I think in the rank and file and even the middle level of leadership about what the vision for governance actually looks like in the longer term. And I would not agree with you more. I mean, I just think that is, I mean, I think this is quite a profound point about the Taliban and we'll get to al-Qaeda in a second, but the Taliban don't have a program for governance. I mean, I spent a fair amount of time in Taliban control of Afghanistan, which is why I've always had a healthy skepticism about their plans for that kind of utopia. Because this was a place that was, you know, the World Bank stopped measuring Afghanistan's economic indicators under the Taliban because there were not. The population of Kabul was 500,000 and it was like a ghost city now. We don't know how large the population is, but four or five million, no one really knows. But so the Taliban, I'm not an expert on the Taliban. I don't claim to be, my view is that they believe that if we create a pure society where everybody is sort of worshiping God and living under Sharia law and our understanding of Sharia law, which obviously isn't how a lot of Muslims would see it, that the world will be made pure and you know, you don't really need to govern. So I think that's the Taliban program. And I think the, your point of the release, Richardson's very interesting point, which is, you know, we know what bin Laden's against, what's he really for? I mean, again, the list of people that the Taliban, that Al Qaeda is against is the United States, Israel, Muslims that don't agree precisely with my point of view, every government in the Middle East, India, Pakistan, you know, the list goes on and on. So I think that's true. And you know, if you would look at the, you know, I refer to this in the book, I mean, David Rappaport is a American political scientist who came out with, you know, essentially he said there were four waves of terrorism, the anarchist wave, the anti-colonial wave, the Marxist wave and now the religious wave. And I think that's all true. No one can debate it. Most of these things didn't succeed. The anarchist wave by definition, they didn't have any ideas and it collapsed of its own lack of ideas as it were, even though they killed President McKinley, they blew up the largest bomb in New York City in history with the terrorist attack that was for many years the most lethal attack it happened, I think in 1930 on Wall Street. And then the anti-colonial wave did succeed. I mean, Bruce Hoffman, you know, the Dean of Terrorism Studies in the United States has written a brilliant book about how Israeli terrorists or let's say Zionist terrorists, you know, essentially pushed the British out of Palestine. But, and that program of terrorism succeeded. The Marxist wave collapsed with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And now we're in the religious wave, which I think it's got a lot of life in it. And I think on 9-11, the 20th anniversary, the split screen the Taliban will want of the world to see is them riding into certain Afghan cities on American military equipment they've seized. And that will be their way of memorializing the 9-11 attacks. And unfortunately, you know, I think that we, the Biden administration has made a, in my view, a terrible, unforced error in simply just sort of turning off the American involvement in Afghanistan. And, you know, we can speculate how it will all play out, but we've seen this movie before in Iraq, after we left, United States left in December of 2011. We went back in three years later. And we made the same mistake in Afghanistan as Canada's knows because our embassy in 1989, that was a very, turned out to be an expensive era. You know, we were blind in Afghanistan to the civil war that followed the pullout of the Soviets, the rise of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, without an embassy. And, you know, we may face that same problem again, because if Kabul airport can't be defended, every embassy is gonna start, the Australian embassy is already closing or closed. You know, people are gonna start pulling out. And we closed our embassy in Sudan in 1995. That also was a mistake, I think, because they've been loud and of course, it's based there for so long. And I think we lost the ability to get some pretty useful information from the Sudanese about al-Qaeda, because we were no longer there. Yeah, I mean, you know, I might quiver with you a little bit about the anarchist movement and its history and its successes in the context of Russia. You know, they're famously really kind of fired the revolution in St. Petersburg. Again, that's a small footnote in quibble. I do think that you are right that the religious wave, as described by Rappaport, is not yet over. And I think one interesting observation is what has risen in the last 20 years to counter that is a extremely, I think, virulent and relatively nascent Christian nationalism that has risen to respond on some level to this idea of a caliphate. You've seen a lot of that online and so forth and so on. And I think in some ways there's kind of a force and counterforce still making this wave very active. But let's talk a little bit about some of the other observations in the book if we can. I mean, some of the things that I think are also super interesting are just all the missed signs and messages and clues as to where bin Laden was, what his intentions were. And of course, many of us, probably who are listening in talking to this talk today, might have seen the movie Zero Dark Thirty and there's a lot of myths that came out of that movie, which is of course documenting the raid on bin Laden's compound in Abadabad, Pakistan. But of course, the central to that narrative is this Abu Ahmad al-Quwaiti, who was a longtime associate of bin Laden, a trusted agent of bin Laden. And information about him comes out pretty early, doesn't it, Peter? Yeah, and I mean, I stand corrected on Candice as a Russianess. So she knows Russian history a lot, but almost anybody else. But so one of the reasons I wrote the book is there's a lot of new material. This is not just the Abadabad documents. I mean, I think the Senate intelligence report on coercive interrogations and secret prisons was it's a very dense report. We have the unclassified version is 500 pages. It has, I think, 2000 plus footnotes, which are a goal line for historians about because a lot of the material surfaced there about in those footnotes about what was really happening, not just in the CIA interrogation program and secret prison, but also kind of the hunt for bin Laden. And I think the report, let's leave you aside the debate on what coercive interrogations useful or not in finding bin Laden. In the book I come down and say they really were not, particularly the CIA coercive interrogation program. In fact, the five leading members of Al Qaeda who had coercive interrogation techniques either supplied misleading information about bin Laden and his whereabouts or no information at all. But, you know, the footnotes sort of describe I think an Agatha Christie story about how bin Laden was found. There was no magic detainee who sort of gave up the information. Bin Laden was pretty paranoid and very careful about his personal security. And after the arrest of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed in 2003, the operational commander of 9-11 who bin Laden and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed had met, which is relatively recently before Khaled Sheikh Mohammed was captured. They met in Swat, which is where one of the places that bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan. From that point forward, bin Laden was being super careful and was meeting with no one outside of his immediate family and his two bodyguards. But, you know, we can piece together from the Senate Intelligence Committee report in particular that the little fragments of information about the Kuwaiti who was the bodyguard started emerging as early as 2002. Now, you know, there was a lot of information coming into the CIA in 2002 about who was in Al Qaeda, their aliases, who their names might be. Al Kuwaiti was just one of hundreds of aliases of Al Qaeda members or associates that were sort of coming in. And his exact significance, I don't think it was begun until it wasn't until about 2007 that the agency really began focusing. And in fact, there was a very interesting memo from 2007 that was surfaced in the Senate Intelligence Committee report that came out, I think, in 2014. So this memo said, essentially, we have, I'm gonna kind of characterize the memo. So we don't have any leads on the lot. The only lead we now have, the only really lively is this guy, Abou Ahmed Al Kuwaiti. We don't go and arrest him. We need to kind of, we don't know exactly where he is, but he is as important as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander at 9-11, was until we arrested him in 2003. So the report, and I won't get in too much in the weeds anymore on this because there was a lot to unpack here in a relatively short time, but the report, the Intelligence Senate Intelligence Committee report is a very good guide to the question of how bin Laden was found. So if I had to say the opening scene at Zero Dark 30 where this guy is essentially tortured or coerced to be interrogated for the first half an hour of the film, and the burden, and the film suggests that without this, there would have been no bin Laden capture, kill operation. I just think, you know, the film is a film. The filmmakers try to have it both ways. They said it was based on actual events at the beginning of the film. And then when they were critiqued on the facts, they said, well, it's not a documentary. So the fact is, is that coercive interrogation by the CIA, I don't think were particularly useful. What was useful, liaison with foreign intelligence services, signals intelligence, human intelligence, spies on the ground, all the things that we kind of know are part of the intelligence community kind of bag of kind of tactics and techniques. Yeah, I mean, I think we can, I think we probably are in agreement. Coercive techniques, in other words, torture of al-Qaeda, so-called high value targets, actually served as more of a political albatross around the neck of successive administrations in the White House because it undercut, I think the credibility of the effort to seek out and decapitate al-Qaeda, you know, in a way that one would judge as, I think, in comportment with international law, it remains, there are many still outstanding questions. Of course, the International Criminal Court is still reviewing those cases. It has been a sticking point in the negotiations with Afghanistan's government, as well as the Taliban, because of course, the ICC has said that all parties are implicated in various war crimes in the Afghanistan theater. So not exactly a plus, but I mean, you kind of raise the shadow of something that I have wondered about for years that we should probably unpack. It does not, I mean, I love this book, by the way, like I've got it all marked up here. Peter doesn't believe me, but I really do have it marked up because I'm a student of the movement. But one big puzzle piece that I think yet remains is the question of Aiman Al-Zawahiri, who of course becomes kind of the manager, the program manager for al-Qaeda, in a way. I think much to the chagrin of many others in the movement, because he isn't a very charismatic guy. You know, he's an Egyptian scholar and Islamist and well-trained, but not a very charismatic guy. But he's still out there somewhere, we think, right, Peter? So what should we make of that? Well, I don't think there's, I mean, some of us speculate that he might be dead or he might be ill. I mean, we just don't know as a factual matter. He certainly, he hasn't played, he's been a terrible leader of al-Qaeda, let's put it that way. He was unable to kind of paper over the differences between ISIS and al-Qaeda, which split in 2014. You know, he hasn't, so he's been a terrible leader. If I was sort of running CIA operations, I'd leave him in place because he's run what remains of the group largely into the ground. He has not been in inspiration. There are other people in the wings who'd be much better. Saif al-Adil is the military commander, for instance. But, you know, one of the themes in the book is, and I wrote my first book about bin Laden. I finished it at 10, about a week before 9-11. And in that book, I exaggerated the importance of Aiman al-Zawari, which was easy to do because in the public statements al-Qaeda made, for instance, they won an only press conference in May of 1998, Zahir is sitting next to bin Laden as if he's sort of a really important person in al-Qaeda. But now I've looked at all the evidence. I mean, actually, Zahir was a very marginal player in al-Qaeda in the pre-9-11 era. He wasn't involved in the planning of any of the major anti-American attacks, the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, the two U.S. embassies attacks in Africa in 98 or 9-11. And that shouldn't be surprising because as a Russianist, you'll appreciate this, Candice. You know, for a good chunk of 1997, Aiman al-Zawari was in a jail in Dagestan. He had gone to try and support the Chechen war effort. He was arrested by the Russians and put in jail. They didn't know who they had in jail. He and two colleagues, eventually they went to trial. They kind of said they were businessmen and it's time I got lost and they were released. But when bin Laden, when Zahir returned, popped up in Afghanistan in 97, 98, he was somebody with virtually no followers. People I quote in the book who knew bin Laden and Aiman al-Zawari well, say he had either five followers, seven followers or 10 followers. Pick your choice. And you know, so this is bin Laden has literally thousands of people that are going through his camps. 170 made members of al-Qaeda who secretly sworn no for the legions and many thousands of people who kind of transit, got trained into camps without necessarily formally becoming part of al-Qaeda. And you know, Zahir was a supplicant in bin Laden's world and he wasn't, and from a strategic point of view, the big strategic shift is something that Zahir had no role in, which is bin Laden said, hey, we should attack the United States, because then they'll pull out of the Middle East and what we want the Middle East will then follow, which is Taliban style theocracies. Now, bin Laden's theory of change was terrible and it backfired totally. 9-11 didn't work. It didn't produce regime change in the Middle East. It didn't get the Americans out. In fact, we've been more involved in the Middle East since 9-11 at any point in American history with huge bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, smaller bases in Djibouti, Syria. I mean, the list goes on and on. Of course, we launched a war in Afghanistan, a war in Iraq, and none of this is something bin Laden predicted. He put a post facto gloss on what his fate is by saying in 2004 it's all a clever plot to bleed the Americans dry in forever wars, but that was not his plan at all before 9-11. And some people, even smart people have sort of, this is going back to your myths question. This is one of the big myths that 9-11 was a clever plot to embroil us in wars in the Middle East. No, quite the reverse. It was supposed to push it out of the Middle East. And so 9-11 was sort of a great tactical victory for al-Qaeda, like Pearl Harbor was for Imperial Japan, but it was also a major strategic failure as Pearl Harbor was for Imperial Japan. Al-Qaeda didn't get what it wanted. Bin Laden died knowing that none of his strategic goals had been achieved. And he died also knowing that his big goal, that how the United States again had not happened. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, because it's sort of reflective of kind of this half form vision that he had of, what would happen after toppling all these regimes? And as we mentioned before, the proof would have been in the pudding during the Arab Spring in 2011, but it just never gelled, it never materialized, right? So that's an interesting point about kind of his legacy and how to interpret it, whether it was a tactical sort of bid or strategic one. And it turned out to be kind of a barely well-planned tactical journey on some levels. So with that, I mean, we've got about 15, 20 minutes here for questions from the audience. I know that there are a few out there. We probably should start by talking a little bit about some of the legacies, but we have a question here from John Mueller. Let me pose that to you, which did the demise of Bin Laden, hamper Al-Qaeda central and its actions in any significant way. So what was the impact of his actual death? John, thanks for John for the question. Of course, John has been a very eloquent chronicler of the war on terror and a great skeptic of American actions during that war and overreactions, I think it's safe to say. But yeah, I mean, so the question is, did Bin Laden's death affect Al-Qaeda? Is that basically the question? Yeah, I mean, I think the short answer is yes, because Aiman Al-Zawari, look, I think it's very telling it took six weeks for Al-Qaeda to elect Zahiri, who was the anointed deputy to become the top leader. And Zahiri is just, he's not an inspirant. You know, he's a black hole of charisma. You know, a lecture from Zahiri is a guarantee to put you to sleep, whether in Arabic or translation. It's like, he has not been a successful leader. He wasn't a great, he was, by the way, he was sort of disliked, you know, one of the themes that you kind of see in Zahiri was, he was always kind of an annoying, kind of, you know, irritating presence. No one, you know, and that was true long before he took over Al-Qaeda. So unsurprising, he hasn't been a particularly effective leader. Al-Qaeda was in bad shape when Bin Laden was killed already. You know, obviously it has had some successes with affiliates in Yemen, North Africa, in the Philippines and elsewhere. And those affiliates have kind of waxed and waned in importance. Al-Qaeda and Iraq eventually, of course, became ISIS. That's a form of success. ISIS continued to look at Bin Laden as the inspirational leader, even when they split off from Al-Qaeda. And he, but, you know, his ideas linger on. I mean, you know, Bin Laden's ideas were not killed with his demise. But, you know, overall, I mean, the fact that we haven't had a significant terrorist attack from Al-Qaeda or its affiliates in the United States since 9-11 speaks for itself. The only one that has happened was that attack in 2019 in Pensacola, Florida, which had some links to Al-Qaeda in Yemen. Three American sailors were killed. But, you know, go back to 2002 and 2003 and the concerns that would be a second wave of attacks. And, you know, none of that happened. The United States has done a very good job of defending itself. It's done a very good job of its offensive operations. You know, the best witness for that has been Laden. The Abadabad documents are just full of his concerns about the drone program, its effects on Al-Qaeda. He was planning to move Al-Qaeda into other parts of Pakistan, maybe back into Afghanistan. And so, you know, we've managed this problem. I mean, the political problem here, and this is John Mother, John would be sort of familiar with this, you can't really declare victory because from a political point of view, if you declare victory and there's even a small terrorist attack that can somehow be traced back to Al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates, you know, the political costs of that are very large. But the fact is that we as analysts and researchers can say we have managed this, we, the United States and its allies have managed this problem pretty well. The last successful attack by Al-Qaeda in the West was 15 years ago in London, July 7th, 2005. You know, obviously you had ISIS with the attacks in 2015 in Paris that killed 130 people on Al-Qaeda. And ISIS certainly helps, ISIS was a sort of step child of Al-Qaeda. But the fact is that United States and its allies, I think done a pretty good job of managing this problem. Here we are 20 years after 9-11, we wouldn't have expected the kind of relative lack of successful terrorist attacks in the West by foreign terrorist organizations. And so I think, yeah, it's not over because as Canada said, the religious wave is sort of terrorism is still with us. But you can't just sort of ignore the problem and hope that we'll just sort of be buried in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies, which is George W. Bush's great observation. I suspect that line was written by Michael Gerson who's now a Washington Post columnist who's a speechwriter for George W. Bush, but it's a great line. And I think, you know, Ben Laden is heading into the kind of oblivion of that unmarked grave of discarded lies, but not yet. No, by no means. I mean, you know, you point out something very interesting. I think that a lot of members of our audience will probably agree with on some level, you know, this idea of kind of clean victories in warfare, I think, you know, we now can acknowledge just a mythos that disappeared on 9-11. Maybe even before that, but I think 9-11 was significant milestones because there was never going to be a clean victory, say this, you know, this war end. And it's distinct. I think the threats have sort of transformed their shape. And, you know, I think another important takeaway, of course, from, you know, what you've just said in your evaluation, and of course the book is that, you know, the United States is not one to take its lessons lightly, even if it is slow to learn, you know, what it means to secure the nation. And it is, you know, endowed with certain capacities to respond when its vulnerabilities are exposed. Unfortunately, it's not always, you know, pretty on the way to the response. But, you know, that capacity is there and that is what differentiates the United States from so many other comers in the world and rivals. We have a question from Benjamin Tua. Where does the Taliban get its money and weapons, and if Biden had pulled the remaining, hadn't, had not removed the remaining troops and air support from Afghanistan, what would it take for the U.S. to withdraw successfully? Well, on the first term, as you know, Candice knows far better than I, because Candice lived in Afghanistan for many years covering this. You know, I mean, there's a billion dollar, I don't know what the correct number is, but let's say it's a billion dollar heroin industry for the Taliban is essentially, you know, they're like in some ways like the FARC in Columbia, which is an insurgent movement that's funded by cocaine trade. Well, this is an insurgent movement funded by the opium and heroin trade. And they're able to pay their foot soldiers and not in significant amount of money. You know, terrorism is usually carried out by volunteers. It doesn't cost a lot of money. So, you know, Amadatta, the lead hijacker on 9-11, he wasn't being paid. He did this because he believed. I'm bin Laden, you know, the Aiman al-Sawari, these are all volunteers. If you're running an insurgency like the Taliban or ISIS in Iraq and Syria, you've got a lot of people on the payroll, many of whom are just trying to make a living. They may believe in the cause, but they're also getting, you know, a not in significant amount of money. So drugs, I think, is the kind of answer with the Taliban. And I'm sure there's also extortion, taxation and the like. Then, you know, what would a successful plan from Afghanistan look like? I mean, I think, you know, we're still in South Korea 75 years after the end of the Korean War. There are more than 25,000 American troops there. They're there for a good reason. And under that American National Security umbrella, South Korea went from probably one of the poorest countries of the world in 1953 at the end of the Korean War, to now one of the richest. And South Korea, of course, is different from Afghanistan. But the point is that 20 years in the grand scheme of things, it's not, some of the trade out 20 year kind of involvement in Afghanistan is a long time. Well, you know, we're still in Japan, we're still in Germany, we're still in South Korea. Things, you know, a country like Afghanistan is not going to become a functional state quickly. But we have certainly undermined it. And I think this is a bipartisan undermining. It began with President Obama with a West Point speech of December 1st, 2009 in which he announced a set of troops on a withdrawal date. I was at CNN that day and I remember, you know, CNN gets a copy of the speech before the speech is given at three o'clock, the call on CNN was withdrawal, not search. And that was what, that was the way it was interpreted in Afghanistan by the Taliban, by the Afghan government, by the Afghan people, by Pakistan. And then we had the Trump administration who said they're constantly going to withdraw. And then we had President Biden who said, you know, we are actually withdrawn. So part of our problem I think has been just simply, you know, we keep saying, we're going to, we keep changing our mind about what our strategy is there. Craig Whitlock, a former colleague of Candace, is coming out with a book around September 11th, which will be actually edited by Priscilla Payton, who did a brilliant job of editing the book that I have just written. That book is based on Craig's kind of really interesting series in the Washington Post about kind of how American leaders, you know, thought about the war and what they said publicly and what they said privately. The fact is we've had multiple different strategies. We've said a lot of different things. We haven't been particularly coherent in terms of what our goals are. But I do think that a complete withdrawal and saying we're completely withdrawing, we could have left one, one Marine outside the US embassy and of course we're going to leave some. But we keep saying, you know, we're really withdrawing now. And it's not an accident the Taliban are, you know, they never had any intention of making peace with either the United States or with the Afghan government. They just, they want to take over and they want to run Afghanistan and they want to return it to what it was like before 9-11. That may be hard to do because there are a lot of well armed Afghan militias as the Afghan National Army and not a particularly in common successful group of military, but they do have a good, very good special forces capability. So I see the civil war in Afghanistan looking like the civil war in the 1990s which I saw myself personally in 93. It was, you know, it makes the present kind of conflict look like a croquet match in terms of the scale of the conflict, the number of people who kind of died. Unfortunately, we could see a return to that. I think that's very likely. Well, I mean, so interesting that you mentioned the Afghanistan papers. Of course I conducted a lot of those interviews that were, you know, kind of the center of Craig's book and his reporting for the Washington Post. And I of course talked to a lot of the folks that you all talked to from NATO, from the US government, from, you know, European partners, Afghans and universally that, you know, I think the big takeaway was that there was no strategy and there was no agreement on the strategy. And so there was a lot of kind of back and forth and waffling. And I think to your other point, Peter which I think is, you know, super interesting about sort of what will this new chapter potentially of the Afghan conflict look like with the Taliban surging forward in, you know, provincial capitals, you know, taking large parts of territory. I think there will be one substantive difference if I may sort of offer that observation which is the Taliban in the 1990s were contending with radio and TV at best in terms of kind of the information environment. Today they're contending with, you know, social media, iPhones, I mean, you know, cell phones, et cetera, et cetera. The whole kind of information environment has changed in Afghanistan as it has around the world. And I think it'll be very, very difficult for this cadre of Taliban to really get their heads around that and control it in ways that, you know, sort of replicates for instance, other authoritarian governments. You can think about Egypt or Myanmar as good examples of where kind of control over information can really shape, you know, the stage of conflict. So just kind of a little, I think, you know, difference there that I think we're gonna watch unfold over time. I think we have time for a couple more questions. I wanna get to those. A good question I think to ask is, of course that we kind of know a little bit about but I think it's worth unpacking. What was Osama bin Laden's relationship with Al-Zarqawi? You talk about this in the book but unpack it here for us. Osama bin Laden was a leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. You know, I mean, I think it's well known that the relationship between al-Qaeda central and al-Qaeda in Iraq was pretty tense. And in fact, there is a lot of material in the about about documents about how angry al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan were about al-Qaeda in Iraq killing Christians and a sort of Iraqi Christians and attacking mosques. So I just think that the relationship was tense publicly, you know, they kind of glossed it over but for privately there was very few kind of real animosity I think between al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda central. But going back to something that the panelists said, I think you're absolutely right. One of the big differences in Afghanistan today is you have hundreds of new TV stations, new radio stations. You have a very young population, I think 70% of their populations under the age of 25. That's a whole group of people who don't have any great nostalgia for the Taliban. In fact, they weren't even born or very, very young when the Taliban were in power. And so I do think the Taliban, Taliban certainly have the guns, the zeal that they're gonna face Uzbek militias, Tajik militias, the Afghan National Army, a bunch of young people who just don't particularly want to be ruled by the Taliban. And they may well take over the South and the East of the country. And if they offer kind of a high degree of peace under a theocracy, that's something that a number of Afghans, particularly Pashtuns will accept. But there will be a bunch of Afghans either because of their political views or because of their ethnic group who just will never accept being ruled by the Taliban. And hopefully the Taliban might agree to some kind of coalition government. But I doubt it. Yeah, right. I mean, I think a small factoid that a lot of people probably don't know, you know, Afghan is kind of a posh to a word for loud. And an actual fact, and many, many Afghans, nationals do not refer to themselves as Afghans in Dari. There's another word for that, simply because they don't like to be associated with this kind of Pashtun, you know, sort of tribal law framing of citizenship. And I think you're gonna see, even though it will be tough and a lot of lies will be lost, there's gonna be a lot of resistance. And I think the Taliban have their work cut out for them if they're not thinking about developing some sort of coalition power sharing agreement with the current Afghan government. We have time for probably one or two more last questions here. I wanna get to this one from our colleague, Hassan Abbas, who of course is one of the preeminent scholars on all things insurgency in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He has been around a long time. And Hassan asks, Peter, is there anything that you learned from the Abadabad documents that surprised you in regards to Bin Laden's local network in Pakistan or the broader region? Well, Hassan, who's a former New America fellow who's a very distinguished scholar of Islam, and wrote a great book about Pakistan and the nuclear weapon program and amongst many other books. So Hassan, I mean, I think one thing that I, it's hard to prove negatives, but there's nothing in the documents to show that Bin Laden was in touch with Pakistani officials, that Pakistani officials knew where he was. There's a whole kind of conspiracy theory about this. I mean, Senator Carl Levin, who unfortunately just recently died, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Armed Services Committee at the time, Bin Laden was killed, said that he believed that senior Pakistani officials were protecting Bin Laden. And that seemed like, you know, the fact that he was found not far from Pakistan to prevent West Point, sort of certainly made people suspicious, but there's nothing in the documents to show that Bin Laden had some sort of Pakistani officer who was his minder, nothing to substantiate. Sai Hirsch's crazy conspiracy theories about the United States and Pakistan, kind of both knowing where Bin Laden was and that he was being kind of protected by Pakistanis and funded by the Saudis and the whole US Navy SEAL operation was kind of like the fake moon landing. And there's just nothing, there's nothing in that substantiating of that. And Bin Laden, you know, mentioned the 6,000 pages of documents, they were never intended to be, they never thought they would land in enemy hands. And they portray al-Qaeda as, you know, basically, you know, the very, very derogatory comments about Pakistan that referring to the Pakistani, Pakistani government as apostates, which is the greatest strategy you can make about a fellow Muslim, plans for military operations against Pakistan are in those documents. There was an attempt to have a truce between al-Qaeda and the Pakistani government. Feelers were put out to the Pakistani Taliban, which had links to the Pakistani government to try and negotiate a truce. In the end, nothing happened. It was just talk as one of the documents outlines. So, I mean, you know, so, you know, the documents just don't substantiate anything that there was any kind of Pakistani collusion knowledge about Bin Laden's presence in Afghanistan. What was my, I think the big surprise, my biggest surprise in all this was the extent to which Bin Laden's two educated wives or his older wives were really helping him think through his strategic thinking because you don't, that's, I mean, to me that was a very interesting, that, you know, there's quite a lot of proof of this now. And I think we kind of knew that several years ago, we knew that Bin Laden's two older wives were highly educated, but I don't think we knew the extent to which they influenced his thinking that they were his intellectual sounding boards. Absolutely. The family angle is just one of the most fascinating parts of the book. We are almost at time here. And so I want to, first of all, once again, commend the book, congratulate you, Peter. Go out, get your copy guys. It's an excellent read. You can dog ear it like me or, you know, do whatever. And I also want to thank Solid State again for helping us organize this event and of course, working with Peter to publish what is I think an excellent account on the anniversary of 9-11 of the rise and fall of Osama Bin Laden. Thank you all for joining us and tune in again for our next conversation with Peter. Thank you guys. Thanks for doing this.