QUOTES by Peter Bergen
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Al-Qaeda, which means 'the base' in English, lost its base and training camps in Afghanistan, while its leaders were on the run, captured, or dead. One year after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda was still on life support.
Quote by -Peter Bergen
What bin Laden had hoped to achieve in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 period, which was to drag the United States into a protracted guerrilla war like the one he had fought against the Soviets, never happened. Instead, that protracted guerrilla war is now playing out in Iraq, in the heart of the Middle East.
Quote by -Peter Bergen
Contrary to what the Americans frequently reiterated, al-Qaeda did not have any relationship with Saddam Hussein or his regime.
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Afghanistan's winters in the north are legendarily harsh, and southern Afghanistan, by contrast, is bleak desert. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that Afghanistan is one of the world's most heavily mined countries.
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Bin Laden's role in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s had made him a hero around the Middle East.
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The 9/11 attack itself played out around the world, with planning meetings in Malaysia, operatives taking flight lessons in the United States, coordination by plot leaders based in Hamburg, and money transfers from Dubai - activities overseen by al-Qaeda's senior command from secure bases in Afghanistan.
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Bin Laden had come to the delusional conclusion that the United States was as weak as the Soviet Union had once been.
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Donald Trump's own mother Mary escaped the bone-crushing poverty of Scotland's remote Outer Hebrides for the promise of New York in 1929.
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Mohammed Taheri-Azar, a naturalized U.S. citizen hailing from Iran, crashed his SUV into a crowd at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006, injuring nine people.
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Ground operations are inherently very risky in Yemen. The two previous JSOC raids in Yemen were both in 2014.
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The American incarceration of Sheikh Rahman was a hot-button issue for al Qaeda for many years.
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Sheikh Rahman had a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Harvard of Islamic thought. He also had a long history of guiding terrorist groups.
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Using vehicles as weapons is a tactic that has often used by Palestinian terrorists to target Israelis, but in 2014, an ISIS spokesman had encouraged such vehicular attacks in the West, saying of ISIS' enemies, 'Run him over with your car.'
Quote by -Peter Bergen
A little exposure to a city like Sulaimani will help Trump understand that the Middle East is a much more complex place than he seems to believe. Perhaps Trump could even give a speech at the American University in Sulaimani, just as President Obama did at Cairo University early in his first term.
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ISIS despises the Russian government for its support of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and so it's no surprise that ISIS began targeting Russia in 2015, around the same time that Russia first intervened in the Syrian civil war.
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In February 2016, Russia arrested seven alleged ISIS militants who were plotting attacks in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The group included Russians and Central Asians and a ringleader who had come from Turkey.
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Bannon should never have had a permanent seat on the NSC, as he is a political operative, and the NSC has traditionally been a place where American interests are considered rather than narrow Republican or Democratic interests.
Quote by -Peter Bergen
More than a decade and half after 9/11, U.S. military actions in countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and several other Muslim nations are governed by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was passed in the days immediately after 9/11.
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Both China and Russia felt duped by the U.N. 'no-fly' zone resolution regarding Libya in 2011 that eventually led to the ouster of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. China and Russia had abstained from the Libyan resolution, and neither country plans to make what they regard as a similar mistake again.
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In 1999, NATO did impose a no-fly zone in Kosovo without seeking a U.N. resolution to carry out air strikes on Serbian forces.
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The Trump administration launched the cruise missile strikes in Syria, an act of war, without a U.N. resolution or Congressional authorization.
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On the campaign trail, candidate Trump occasionally raised the idea of creating 'safe zones' for Syrian civilians.
Quote by -Peter Bergen
It is in American and Afghan interests for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan so it doesn't turn into Iraq circa 2014, with the Taliban controlling much of the country while hosting a strong presence of ISIS and al-Qaeda as well as every other jihadist group of note.
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The Green Berets of U.S. Special Forces 5th Group - known as 'the Legion' - who led the anti-Taliban campaign represent a textbook case of a successful Special Forces campaign.
Quote by -Peter Bergen
The documentary feature film 'Legion of Brothers' tells the stories of the handful of U.S. Special Forces soldiers who, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, went into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and, within a matter of weeks, overthrew the Taliban regime.
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In one notorious episode in 2002, in the holy city of Mecca, the religious police prevented girls from fleeing a school that was on fire because they were not properly dressed.
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When ISIS and al Qaeda have attacked or plotted attacks in the West in the past decade or so, they have invariably used hydrogen peroxide-based bombs because acquiring military-grade explosives or dynamite is nearly impossible for would-be terrorists in Western countries.
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Abedi appears to be one of the many thousands of Western Muslims who have embraced militant Islam, often as a way of trying to resolve the tension between their split identities.
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Security services, from Afghanistan to the United States, should be alert throughout the Ramadan period, but especially on the 27th day of the holy month.
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In late May 2016, an ISIS spokesman called for attacks in the West during the month of Ramadan.
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The hard reality is that attacks by vehicles in public places are very hard to defend against in a free and open society. The best defense against such attacks is good intelligence, and that often comes from inside the Muslim community.
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Will there be a political backlash against British Prime Minister Theresa May, whose ruling Conservative Party is traditionally seen as 'stronger' on terrorism than its main rival, the Labour Party?
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Because of the 9/11 attacks, the framing of terrorism by politicians, the media, and the public too often in the past decade and a half has been that it is Islamist political violence that is the terrorism we need to be concerned about.
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The commonly accepted definition of terrorism is that it is politically motivated violence directed at civilians by entities other than a state. These kind of attacks can come from the far right, the far left, racists of every stripe, as well as jihadists.
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There are all sorts of despicable people who journalists have done interviews with, and it's been useful. Isn't more information better than less information?
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If a parent knows that their kid is suddenly becoming infatuated with ISIS, they face a very difficult choice, which is, you know, do I - what do I do?
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It's much harder to detect a lone wolf than it is somebody who's associated with a larger organization who's having planning meetings and making phone calls to people in the organization. And so that is really how the jihad has really developed in the United States.
Quote by -Peter Bergen
9/11 was a sort of hinge event in American history, and all jihadi terrorist plots or attacks are kind of filtered through that lens.
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Sanctions on Pakistan have been part of the troubled U.S.-Pakistan relationship in the past and should not be considered as an option in the future.
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Bin Laden was intelligent, well-informed, and low key. The people around him treated him with great deference, calling him 'sheikh,' a term of respect.
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ISIS' key social media-encrypted platform is Telegram, which is engineered by a Berlin-based tech company that can simply ignore the rulings of American federal judges as well as legislation passed by the U.S. Congress.
Quote by -Peter Bergen
Since Snowden went public, companies such as Apple and Google - two of the world's most valuable companies - have incorporated much greater encryption into their products and have also been at pains to show that they will not go along with U.S. government demands to access their encrypted products.
Quote by -Peter Bergen