E-mail a friendSteve Coll
airdate April 18, 2008
In addition to being president-CEO of New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute, Steve Coll is also a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He's won two Pulitzers—one for explanatory journalism, for a series about the SEC, and the second for general non-fiction (Ghost Wars). Coll began his career as a journalist at California magazine. He went on to spend 20 years at The Washington Post, as a foreign correspondent, senior editor and managing editor. The Bin Ladens is his newest book.
Steve Coll
Tavis: Steve Coll is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who serves as president of the New America Foundation and is also a staff writer at "The New Yorker." The author of the award-winning book, "Ghost Wars," is out now with a new one called "The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century." Steve Coll, nice to have you on the program.
Steve Coll: Thanks, Tavis. Thanks for having me.
Tavis: Glad to have you. Let me start with this Op Ed piece you wrote this past Sunday in the "Los Angeles Times." In the article, you suggest that you believe that bin Laden will be caught perhaps in the next year, probably in the next year, likely in the next year. I forgot the exact word you used, but that does make a difference. You tell me what word you used and tell me why you made the argument.
Coll: Well, I think it's more likely that he'll be caught in the next year or two than at any time since December of 2001, and the reason is that I think he's in Pakistan and his popularity in Pakistan has fallen through the floor over the last six or eight months.
The way these hunts usually end, the way they have ended in the past, is that somebody drops a dime on the fugitive either to get the reward money or because they think that the moral equation now argues for his capture. His popularity is in the single digits in some of the areas in the west of Pakistan, according to international polling.
Also, there's a new government in town and I think they have a different set of motivations than the last one. They came to power as a democratic government arguing that they would be a better partner in counter-terrorism than General Musharraf had been before them. I think they have an opportunity to demonstrate that by fixing the one big problem that Musharraf was never able to solve.
Tavis: But those people who you reference now, the new leaders, were elected by everyday people.
Coll: They were.
Tavis: And those everyday people would be. . .
Coll: They're no more happy about the United States than they were before, but they're angry at Osama bin Laden because they see him as responsible for an unprecedented wave of suicide bombings against Pakistanis. Ordinary Pakistanis have become his victims. So while they have complicated views about the U.S. and what we call the war on terrorism, locally they are fed up with this violence where they see themselves as on the receiving end with no justification. And Osama is an outsider who isn't really part of their society.
Tavis: And that would be then, obviously, the reason why his poll numbers are so low?
Coll: Right, exactly, exactly.
Tavis: One other question about that before we talk about the text, what's your sense then, if we're going to catch him in the next year or two, that we've not been able to catch him here before? You may have already given that answer away, but let me just ask it directly.
Coll: Well, some of it is effort and I don't think that the American effort is much more robust now than it has been over the last few years. Iraq is such a drain on resources and attention, so it is what it is.
But the one thing that hasn't worked has been this effort to communicate with ordinary Pakistanis who might have useful information and encourage them to share it either with their own government or with the Americans, if that's what they prefer. That's the environment that's now, I think, different than it was a couple of years ago.
Tavis: I want to dissect this title before I get into the text, which I don't often do, but I'm really taken aback by yours. Not in a negative way, but it got my attention. "The Bin Ladens," An Arabian Family in the American Century." What do you mean by "the American century"?
Coll: Well, the twentieth century was dominated globally by American culture and American power after the Second World War. In Saudi Arabia and in many parts of the Middle East, these very young societies coming of age with great wealth all of a sudden, when they started to think about who they were or what they confronted as one of their choices was American culture, American pop culture, American ideas about personal choice, American ideas about religious freedom.
Some of these ideas were very appealing and some were revolting or confusing, so a lot of the passage that a family like the bin Ladens knew when they came of age with all this money in the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of the choices they had to make as individuals, were shaped directly by the presence of American ideas in their lives and American brands and American culture.
Tavis: This may be one and the same, but let me just put it out there first. I'm thinking ahead of myself. I can see the intrigue about a guy named Osama bin Laden, but you've gone deeper than that in this very dense text here. You've talked about the bin Laden family. What intrigued you about the family that made you want to do this?
Coll: A couple of things. I mean, I used to read books that were called "The Rockefellers" or "The Kennedys," these multi-generational novelistic family sagas that told you something about American history or American politics over a long period of time.
Getting to know Saudi Arabia, I thought the bin Ladens in a similar way over many different years offered a way to write in specific terms about Saudi Arabia and break past the clichés that we all lived with of, you know, the greedy oil sheik pouring gasoline into your tank. In fact, Saudi Arabia is a very complicated place and younger people, of whom Osama is one, a boomer in a sense, they have very diverse lives and they face very diverse pressures.
It's hard to get underneath the surface there, but through the story of a specific family and all of the extraordinary diversity in its own ranks, Osama was one of fifty-four children and those fifty-four are bound by a great sense of belonging, but also a lot of contracts in the lives that they chose to lead.
Tavis: I don't want to color this anymore. I want to give you some broad latitude here. Tell me, then, about the bin Ladens. You got a whole book here, but things that you found most fascinating and interesting about them, the family.
Coll: Well, for instance, between the time that Osama's father died in a plane crash caused by an error by his American pilot in 1967, between then and the death of his oldest brother in 1988, the family was run by Salem bin Laden, Osama's oldest brother, who ran it like an Emir, like a king. Salem was as American as Osama was anti-American.
He was a rock and roll musician, a pilot, an adventurer. He spent a lot of time in Texas, in Florida, and California, and he traveled with this entourage in a jet-set way. He had his own fleet of planes. He thought no more about going across to Paris tomorrow for dinner than you or I might think about going across town, yet he collaborated with Osama in the Afghan War. Sold him guns, publicized his cause.
This was at a time when everybody was on the same side in Afghanistan, including the United States. But the only Americans that I can document Osama ever met in his whole life, apart from journalists whom he granted interviews, were these shaggy-haired, chain-smoking pilots and mechanics from Texas and Sweden and Germany who used to fly around with Salem and go skiing one day and fly up to the Afghan War and deliver guns and money the next.
So there was just this extraordinary set of contrasts and choices within the family. These were kids with allowances of, you know, several hundred thousand dollars a year in the early 1970s, no taxes to pay, and mobility. They could purchase any identity they wanted. Some of them purchased the identity of playboys and jet-set Westerners, and Osama purchased the identity of a revolutionary. Yet they had a great sense of belonging to one another as a family.
Tavis: I want to let you unpack why it is you think - you talk about it in the book - but why did you think that he chose that route and his brother, Salem, chose the other route? What is fascinating for me is your point that he hasn't met many Americans, maybe six or seven in his entire life.
Coll: Right, exactly.
Tavis: His father, to your earlier point, dies in a plane crash that's piloted by an American.
Coll: Right.
Tavis: I don't want to be, you know, salacious here or a conspiracy theorist here, but I'm trying to get a sense of whether or not either of those things or the combination of both have anything to do with the philosophy that he's developed about the West, about America.
Coll: Well, probably not with the philosophy, but maybe a little bit of the imagination that he brought to bear on September 11 because not only his father died in a plane crash, but Salem died in an ultra-light recreational aircraft accident outside of San Antonio in 1988, two months before Osama formed Al Qaeda.
His brothers came to Texas to investigate the accident. I've looked into it. I think it was an accident, but it was sort of hard to explain because Salem was a great pilot. He made a silly mistake. They thought he might have been killed by somebody, so presumably Osama at least entertained that idea. But that's context.
To get to your sort of more, I think, important question which is his philosophy, you know, he was recruited into this stream of radical Islam while he was in prep school. He was essentially thirteen or fourteen years old. His father had just died. He was at a school where the boys wore blue blazers and gray flannel slacks and they were taught English by British and Irish teachers in Saudi Arabia.
Tavis: Real quick, taught English, but I just want to underscore this. Unlike his brother, he's never been to the U.S.?
Coll: He may have been once.
Tavis: One time.
Coll: One time on a short medical visit, but he's been to England a few times and he watched a lot of American TV when he was growing up as a teenager. He watched "Bonanza" and westerns and he loved horses and stories about boys with horses.
Tavis: Well, I'm only raising that because not necessarily to know us is to love us. I don't mean to make that point; to know us is to love us. But being exposed to us might take some of the venom, for lack of a better word, out of him regarding America.
Coll: No, I think that's actually absolutely right because a lot of his brothers and sisters found, when they came to the United States, that they could be themselves in a way that was a form of escape from Saudi Arabia.
In the states, you know, nobody really cared where you came from. It was complicated to figure that out. So they could relax and enjoy themselves, and Osama never really wanted this alternative identity. He was content from thirteen or fourteen when his Syrian gym teacher recruited him into the Muslim Brotherhood, content to be an activist in that way.
One characteristic that is striking when you go into his biography in some detail is that he's a very stubborn person. You know, he had lots of opportunities over the course of his adult life to compromise. He was offered money, positions as an executive in the family business, prestige in the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
They pleaded with him. "Come home. You can have it all. You can have family. You can have religion. You can have wealth." At each turning point, he describes his own thinking. He thought about it, but then he decided that he'd been called by God onto a different path.
Tavis: And I'm glad you said that because I'm obviously not condoning anything he's ever said or done. I don't want that to be taken out of context on YouTube somewhere. But that said, it's one thing to be stubborn. It's another thing to be convicted. Is he stubborn or does he have conviction about this?
Coll: I think that's entirely a question of your point of view. I think his followers think that he is an incredibly righteous and committed person who has sacrificed. Precisely because he sacrificed all this wealth and opportunity and is willing to sleep on the ground and work with, you know, his followers, and he's a guy who has been able to build an incredibly diverse following, vary rare in the Arab world and in the terrorist racket to have people from all walks of life and every continent gather around him and, you know, he breaks bread with everybody.
He's quiet. He doesn't rule through intimidation. He doesn't take people back out behind the tent and shoot them when they disagree with him. That created his charisma and his aura.
I also think just parenthetically that he got that from his family. There is a streak of charisma in his brothers' very westernized life and in his father's life that's also present in Osama, but for a different purpose.
Tavis: I got about forty-five seconds left, Steve. Let me ask you right quick how he is treated, maltreated, included, not included, is even possible to be connected anymore to his family?
Coll: Well, he's been excluded from the main family, but he also has his own children. Some of his sons are probably still with him in exile in one way or another. He had a step-family that was closer to him in the run-up to 9/11, but has now had to let him go. But he's living a life of exile and he feels his hardships. He told his children in his last will, "Don't follow me into Jihad. It's not the life I want for you."
Tavis: It's a fascinating look into the family of the man that we are still allegedly in hunt of who Steve Coll believes we might find in the next year or so as his popularity falls and somebody turns him in one day, so often the way these stories end. The name of the book is "The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century" written by the author of "Ghost Wars," two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, Steve Coll. Steve, nice to have you here.
Coll: Tavis, thank you very much for having me.
Tavis: It's my pleasure.
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