The news that Al Qaeda had cased buildings in New York, Washington and elsewhere —
which was revealed on computer discs taken from an Al Qaeda communications operative who
was recently arrested in Pakistan — brings to mind Alan Cullison’s lucky accident in northern
Afghanistan almost three years ago.
Perhaps you remember Cullison? He’s the Wall Street Journal reporter, currently a Nieman
Fellow at Harvard, whose laptop was smashed while he was covering the war against the
Taliban. Looking to replace it, he bought a couple of computers for $1,100. His acquisition,
as Cullison recounts in the current
issue of The Atlantic, “was unique in the experience of journalists covering radical Isalm.”
What he purchased was a 40-gigabyte IBM desktop and a Compaq laptop that had
been stolen “from al-Qaeda’s central office in Kabul on November 12, the night before the city fell
to the Northern Alliance.” It turned out that the desktop computer “had been used mostly
by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy,” and “contained nearly a thousand text
documents, dating back to 1997.”
Cullison and a WSJ colleague, Andrew Higgins, eventually wrote a series of articles for the
Journal in 2002 based on those documents, most in Arabic but also in French, Farsi, English and
Malay. The result “was an astonishing inside look at the day-to-day world of al-Qaeda, as
managed by its top strategic planners — among them bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Atef, Ramzi bin
al-Shibh, and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, all of whom were intimately involved in the planning of
9/11, and some of whom (bin Laden and al-Zawahiri) are still at large.”
The documents included budgets, training manuals for recruits, and scouting
reports for international attacks, and they shed light on everything from personnel matters and
petty bureaucratic sniping to theological discussions and debates about the merits of suicide
operations. There were also video files, photographs, scanned documents, and Web pages, many
of which, it became clear, were part of the group’s increasingly sophisticated efforts to conduct a
global Internet-based publicity and recruitment effort.
Cullison points out that “one of the most important insights to emerge from the computer is
that 9/11 sprang not so much from al-Qaeda’s strengths as from its weaknesses.” Lack of financial
resources — no links to Iraq were indicated “or to any other deep-pocketed government” (Saudi
connections notwithstanding) — led to “bitter infighting” within Al Qaeda. Strikes against the
United States were intended to end “the internal rivalries” and unify the group.
Most interesting, Cullison draws the conclusion that while 9/11 was a tactical victory for Al
Qaeda, its top leadership even then was playing a long-range strategic game to bait the United
States.
Like the early Russian anarchists who wrote some of the most persuasive
tracts on the uses of terror, al-Qaeda understood that its attacks would not lead to a quick
collapse of the great powers. Rather, its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back in a way that
would create sympathy for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has so far gained little from the ground war in
Afghanistan; the conflict in Iraq, closer to the center of the Arab world, is potentially more
fruitful. As Arab resentment against the United States spreads, al-Qaeda may look less like a
tightly knit terror group and more like a mass movement. And as the group develops synergy in
working with other groups branded by the United States as enemies (in Iraq, the Israeli-occupied
territories, Kashmir, the Mindanao Peninsula, and Chechnya, to name a few places), one wonders
if the United States is indeed playing the role written for it on the computer.
Cullison supports his observations with more than a dozen examples of the e-mail messages
sent to and from Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar (leader of the Taliban),
Muhammad Atef, Abu Mosab al-Suri, Abu Khalid al-Suri, Tariq Anwar and unnamed
conspirators, and shared by others in the Al Qaeda leadership such as Ramzi bin al-Shibh
and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.
In a television interview on
C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Cullison discusses the issues raised by his Atlantic article and
answers questions from the public about Al Qaeda. (Scroll down to the program of 8/9.)
