AL QAEDA'S COMPUTER TALES

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.)