E-mail a friendLawrence Wright
airdate November 6, 2007
Lawrence Wright is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower, which has been called "the Bible" by those still pursuing bin Laden. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the '98 film, The Siege, which foretold many post-9/11 world conditions. Wright graduated from Tulane and taught at American University in Cairo. He is author of the novel, God's Favorite, and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. In his 'spare time,' he plays keyboard in the blues band, Who Do.
Lawrence Wright
Tavis: Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for the "New Yorker" magazine and a former contributing editor at "Rolling Stone." His bestselling book on the rise of al Qaeda is the recipient of this year's Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and is now out in paperback. The book, "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11." Lawrence Wright, nice to have you here and congratulations on the Pulitzer.
Lawrence Wright: Thanks, Tavis, it's great to be here.
Tavis: What does it feel like to put this kind of work into a text and to be rewarded not just with bestseller status but with a Pulitzer, no less?
Wright: It's a dream come true. I didn't know when I was working on the book that it would get that kind of reception, and God knows there were plenty of other books that came out about al Qaeda while I was working on mine, but it's been very gratifying. Now I'm just looking for the next project, so, yeah.
Tavis: What is it about what you think - and this calls for setting your modesty aside for just a second - what do you think about what you had to say in here is what got the attention of so many readers and the Pulitzer people?
Wright: I suppose that I knew when I started this project it was probably going to be the most important thing I ever did with my life, and I wanted to give it the best shot I had. So I spent five years on it. I talked to more than 600 people. I don't know how many countries I visited and I just did the best I possibly could. And I was really gratified that it got the kind of response it did, but I wasn't doing it for that. I was doing it for me.
Tavis: I ask that question in part because of your earlier statement that there were so many books, and certainly since this came out even more books written about al Qaeda, so there's no shortage of text about this mutating organism that we're trying to still figure out, as it were.
What is it about - that said, what is it about al Qaeda that after your book, after all the other text, that we still, in terms of our government, don't get about this entity?
Wright: Well, our government is very poorly prepared to understand al Qaeda, to start with. We don't have the kind of people in our intelligence services who can understand, much less speak the language. But to understand and penetrate, disrupt al Qaeda, you need to have people who natively speak Arabic, Post-Udari, Urdu - the languages of the struggle - and they don't have those people to start with.
So from the very baseline, we're starting out with a tremendous amount of ignorance. Secondly, al Qaeda's changed, and before 9/11 it was a top-down, hierarchical organization. At that time, it offered health benefits. You could get a month-long, paid vacation. It was a good job for a lot of these guys. It's -
Tavis: Al Qaeda had health benefits?
Wright: Yes, indeed.
Tavis: Wow.
Wright: And you could go back home, they'd pay your flight home and pay your month-long salary while you're on vacation. So it was a fairly decent job for a lot of these young jihadis who didn't have very much else to do with their lives.
Tavis: I'm trying to resist the temptation to look in camera one and just say, “Al Qaeda had healthcare, and we can't figure out the SCHIP program for children in America.” But I'm not going to say that into camera one on PBS tonight.
Let me get back to al Qaeda. You have argued persuasively that one of the mistakes we made when we had al Qaeda on the run - and you're not the only one to make this argument, but you won the Pulitzer, so you win - but you make the argument that we had al Qaeda on the run when we went into Afghanistan, and because of this administration insisting that we shift our focus to Iraq and to Saddam Hussein, we have allowed them to mutate, to metamorphosize - pick a word.
Wright: Well, if you read their own internal memoranda, al Qaeda leaders will tell you that they were dead. In December 2001, after Tora Bora, 80 percent of al Qaeda's membership was captured or killed. The leaders got away, but they were scattered, they were impoverished, they were unable to communicate with each other, and they were repudiated all over the world.
And they spent about three years in this kind of zombie-like state. It was Iraq, the war in Iraq, that breathed life back into that monster, gave it a new place to train, gave jihadis a new cause, something to rally around. That was the critical mistake we made with al Qaeda.
Tavis: That leads us, then, to Pakistan, because we understand that Pakistan is the place where al Qaeda has pretty much had the ability, the capacity, the surroundings, the space, if you will, to kind of regroup. As a matter of fact, yesterday, in the - Monday's edition, rather, November 5th, of the "Los Angeles Times," the headline reads "Pakistan Fails to Aim Billions in U.S. Military Aid at al Qaeda."
So that we have been giving Pakistan billions of dollars that we thought was being used in the fight against al Qaeda, and apparently, according to the "L.A. Times," the money has been used for something else. What do you make of that story?
Wright: Well, Pakistan is in the looking-for-bin-Laden business. If they found him, they'd be out of business. So it's 10 billion all together. If you count the non-military aid that we've given to Pakistan since 9/11, it's an extraordinary amount of money.
Tavis: Let me jump in right quick. Is your point that the minute Pakistan finds bin Laden, the money from us gets cut off, and so there really isn't an all-out effort to find him?
Wright: We'd lose the - the incentive we have to give Pakistan money now is that we want their help in the war on terror. And as long as bin Laden is out there, the war is still on. When and if he is caught, then the war on terror will begin to come to a real stop, and Pakistan will be looking at the loss of a considerable amount of aid.
Tavis: That puts - I hear the point you're making, Lawrence, but that puts a whole lot of weight on one man, and with all due respect to, again, you and the book and the Pulitzer, I'm not sure that any one guy - you tell me if I'm wrong, because you made the point - but how can one guy be that all-powerful?
Wright: Are you talking about Musharraf or about -
Tavis: I'm talking about bin Laden. Your point was if we catch him, it shifts the war on terror.
Wright: It does.
Tavis: There are a lot of folk who believe that that's giving him way too much clout.
Wright: I disagree with that. There's nobody else in the al Qaeda movement that has the kind of moral standing with young Muslims, disaffected Muslims all over the world. Nobody else is going to follow Ayman al Zahawari, he doesn't have that kind of charisma, he doesn't command a following. There's no obvious successor to Osama bin Laden, so having him still alive, still directing traffic, snubbing his nose at the U.S., six years now after 9/11, that's a very, very powerful statement.
It matters that bin Laden is still there. Because of him, I think we haven't acknowledged what's really going on in al Qaeda right now. It's disintegrating into a bunch of criminal gangs. They make their money out of opium in Afghanistan, out of kidnapping and out of stealing the oil shipments in Iraq, out of big game poaching in Africa.
Essentially, these are criminal activities; they're not the activities of some political or religious group. They're like a mob.
Tavis: How do you - the president doesn't have an answer for us, apparently, but how would Lawrence Wright explain to the American people how it is and why it is - I understand why Pakistan, if your point is correct, they want the money, they're not looking that hard for the guy, that's your argument.
How do we, the world's superpower, have one guy who we're chasing for this many years and not put our finger on him? There are a lot of folk who just believe that we - I ask that because there are a lot of folk who believe, pardon my English, it ain't just Pakistan, but it's us who aren't trying hard enough to find this guy.
Wright: Well, there's some truth in that, Tavis, because U.S. policymakers are paralyzed by Pakistan. They fear that Pakistan is a bigger problem in their minds than al Qaeda. Because Pakistan has the bomb, it's got a lot of very radical people in it. Suppose there was a coup and radical Islamists took control, and they were able to distribute nuclear material to exactly people like Osama bin Laden? That is what American policymakers fear.
Now, the reason I think it's not such a great problem is that Pakistan is much more stable in many respects - and in unfortunate respects. It's the military that runs Pakistan. It's not only that they run Pakistan, they own a lot of the stuff. A lot of that money we've been giving them. They own the hotels, they own the insurance companies, they own the banks, they own prime real estate all over the country. What they're doing is protecting their pensions and their investments. They're not going to let the country devolve into some kind of Islamist chaos.
Tavis: How, then, should the American public read - when you say Pakistan, and I'm trying to juxtapose your statement that Pakistan is relatively stable with Musharraf locking up opponents literally as we speak, Bhutto - Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister, going back to Pakistan, massive explosion and death with her coming back, and yet she is the future of democracy, many people believe. How do we read what's happening inside of Pakistan right now?
Wright: My reading of it is that the Army is afraid of experimenting with democracy. That's the reason Musharraf won't take off his uniform. The army is more important and more powerful to him than the democratic expression of his people. What was happening in Pakistan - this is really a tragic moment in Pakistan's history, because the Supreme Court was leading a revolution, asserting the rule of law in a country where it hasn't been allowed to have that kind of expression since Musharraf came to power.
They were finally saying, “We're going to force you to choose. Either you're going to be a democratically elected candidate or you're going to be the head of the army, but we're no longer going to live under the pretense that this is not a military dictatorship.” And this is his answer. I think it's tragic.
Tavis: I'm going to circle back to end our conversation to the beginning of the conversation. You suggested earlier that we don't have the tools, we don't have the folk who speak the language, we don't have the folk with the understanding, we're not gathering the proper intel - whatever the reasons are for why we are not equipped properly at the moment to deal with al Qaeda.
Give me some reason to believe that that's going to get better. Give me some reason to believe that things are changing. Disabuse me of the notion that if it continues this way, then we're going to end up on the short end of this stick.
Wright: What I can tell you, Tavis, is I know that I've been writing about the intelligence community for the "New Yorker," and they are aware of the fact that they are handicapped by the fact that they don't have the qualified people that they need to really understand this culture that they're fighting against. And they have erected these formidable security barriers so that okay, you speak Arabic, and you would be a perfect candidate for the intelligence community, but your parents are still in Lebanon, or you have a sister living in Morocco or something. Therefore, we can't hire you.
Well, that's ridiculous. If we can't take people and trust them with lie detector tests, all the usual stuff that you go along with when you're in the intelligence community anyway, we're never going to have the people inside. Look at the FBI, for instance, which made its reputation fighting against the mafia and the IRA.
Who's in the FBI? If you go up on the seventh floor of the FBI headquarters, Irish and Italian guys. It's not surprising that they were successful fighting against those organizations. They came from the same communities, they spoke the same languages. They knew who they were fighting against.
They can't even pronounce the names of these guys. I talked to the head of the army translation corps, and he said after 9/11, many American Muslims and Arabs came forward and offered their services to American intelligence, but they were spurned, and the army picked up a lot of them. And what happened? They went to Iraq. They became interpreters - the most dangerous imaginable assignment.
After four years of serving their country, he says, they can't get a job in American intelligence because they're considered a security risk. Well, there is a security at risk - it's our security that's at risk.
Tavis: There are many books, as we said earlier in this conversation, being written about al Qaeda, but only one is this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. It is the book by Lawrence Wright, it's called "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11." Lawrence, thanks for your work. Nice to have you on the program.
Wright: It's been a pleasure, thanks again.
Tavis: Good to see you.
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