Talking With Terrorists

Jessica Stern's new book reports from the front lines of the War on Terror.

Tim Cavanaugh from the November 2003 issue

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reason: In your discussions with Islamists, most cite the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan as their formative experience. That's not too surprising when you're talking about Pakistanis, but it also applies to Kashmiris, Palestinians, Indonesians, Chechens, Saudis -- just about everybody. Do you think Americans, even now after it's been in the air for a few years, really grasp the magnitude of what we helped create in Afghanistan?

Stern: No, we don't. It was the revival of the notion of an international jihad. As far as [militants are] concerned, it was very effective. They feel they vanquished an international superpower. They forget how much money we and the Saudis and others poured in to help them vanquish that superpower. But we played a very significant role in the creation of the enemy we face today. It's very distressing because it would be easy to do that sort of thing again in Iraq. Policy remedies tend to have unfortunate side effects.

I continue to believe many of the arguments for the war. I'll be very surprised if we don't eventually find evidence of weapons of mass destruction. My prejudice is that Iraq was doing everything possible to reconstruct that program. And I'm no longer skeptical of the links between bin Laden and Saddam; I don't buy that bin Laden considered Saddam such an infidel that he would never cooperate with him.

I'm hearing Hezbollah is very active in Iraq. There are other things that are at the level of hearsay. A very well-connected contact of mine is saying he's meeting Iranians interested in fighting Americans in Iraq. Guerrillas who claim to be part of Al Qaeda are taking credit for some of the attacks in Iraq. Are they part of Al Qaeda? No, but you can see the "enemy of my enemy" idea: In a way, we're pushing together groups that we wouldn't expect to see working together. We've given them something that really brings them together.

For the moment we're creating chaos, although our intention is to create a functioning liberal democracy. The likelihood that we're going to pull that off anytime soon doesn't seem very high to me.

I actually think the best argument against the war in Iraq was made by one of its biggest supporters, Kenneth Pollack in his book The Threatening Storm. He argued that it's imperative to go in there, but that if we don't do it right we're going to make it worse. And we're not doing it right. Or at least, we can see the Pentagon was very surprised by the chaos.