Author Steve Coll has written the two books everyone needs to read to understand the how and why of 9/11

IN THE WEEKS after September 11, 2001, Steve Coll, then managing editor of the Washington Post, found himself reminded of a dusty box he had stashed away almost 10 years before. Inside were the yellowed notebooks from his tour as the Post’s South Asia bureau chief from 1989 to 1992, and his firsthand impressions of a shadowy conflict that had just extended its reach to American soil. Coll knew that the men who had targeted the US had been trained and funded by American spymasters. To understand 9/11 better, he wanted to know more about the Cold War brinksmanship over Afghanistan and Pakistan. The book that resulted, Ghost Wars, which Coll wrote while running the Post, won the 2005 Pulitzer prize, Coll’s second. In it, Coll gave the fullest account to date of the covert operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the US decision to abandon them in the 1990s, which set the stage for the rise of the Taliban and their longtime guest, Osama bin Laden. Coll’s latest book, The Bin Ladens, is a companion to Ghost Wars. It describes the making of Osama bin Laden by telling the tale of his sometimes outlandish family’s central role in building modern Saudi Arabia.

Coll’s office is a straight shot down Connecticut Avenue from the White House. Now the president of a policy think tank called the New America Foundation and a writer for the New Yorker, Coll remains a hungry reporter. He shows me a stack of papers next to his desk that he says are full of scoops and leads that, when he was editor at the Post, he would have fed to reporters. Now he’s started a blog at the New Yorker to fill with these loose ends. When I put two recorders on the table, Coll laughs knowingly. I explain how I started using two recorders at interviews following a 2002 meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in which one of the tape recorders stopped midway through. “It’s just amazing how often that happens,” says Coll, “and it makes you just feel so ridiculous.”

Yeah, amateur hour.
The only thing you have to do as a reporter – it’s not like running a small platoon of soldiers into a complex operation where everybody’s life is on the line and there are rendezvous points – you just have to turn the fricking recorder on and ask questions. Without redundancy, I’m always going like this [Coll leans over the coffee table pretending to check if the recorder is still running. The glass tabletop tilts like a seesaw, sending both recorders sliding] making an idiot out of myself to make sure it’s still working at 10 minute intervals.

When I was reading The Bin Ladens, it occurred to me that there could be personal risk for anyone writing a dirty laundry book about a very powerful Saudi family – even if Osama wasn’t part of the story. Have you felt threatened at any point in the course of writing this book?
I have not. The family was unhappy about the depth of my interest in the particulars of their history. At times they expressed their unhappiness but never in a threatening way. And like so many journalists, I’ve done so much work for such a long time where if you start thinking about risk in that way, you’re just going to defeat yourself. I didn’t actually think it was a dangerous project and nothing has happened since to make me reconsider that.

Have you ever been threatened by al Qaeda?
Yes, but indirectly. I have never been informed that I have been a particular target or enemy of theirs. The funniest thing that happened was that a Pakistani journalist friend of mine was traveling in the tribal areas and he came across some Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan and somehow in the conversation the idea that he might know me came up. He said that they were creating bootleg Pushto translations of Ghost Wars and other books. I tend to think this is a good thing as a security issue, but I don’t know.

You’ve been writing Taliban pulp fiction and didn’t know it?
[Laughs] That’s right. And who knows what the translation says? I doubt that it has much skeptical language about [Taliban leader]Mullah Omar. The other funny thing that happened was my wife and I just bought a co-op apartment in New York and we were at the board interview. And one of our neighbors had just read a review of The Bin Ladens in the paper. He said, “I was reading it and then it occurred to me, ‘Are we going to get truck bombed?’ I live on the ground floor.” [Laughs] I assured him that I had no information that I was a target and I truly believe that if somebody capable of carrying out such an attack were to actually get themselves into operational mode, surely they would have better people to go after than me.

You’re one of the best-sourced people on al Qaeda. What is your feeling on where Osama is, how he lives and what kind of control he has over al Qaeda?
I believe he’s on the Pakistan-Afghan border, probably either in the Bajor tribal agency or North Waziristan. And conceivably one of the other agencies, but those would seem to be the two most likely. I imagine that when we finally learn about his life in exile it will be a story of some moving from safe house to safe house but also long periods hunkered down. I imagine him in a compound of the sort that you see up there. You always think of the tribal areas as backward with primitive conditions. In truth a lot of drug money, smuggling money and expatriate remittances have made the housing in that area – while they’re remote and not served by roads and electricity is often self-generated – they’re like castles. They’re big mud forts. They’re reasonably comfortable. Better than what you find in many places in Afghanistan. So I imagine him inside a walled compound. Knowing him, I would guess he’s remarried just to pass the time. Maybe more than once. And he may have a small family living with him in his compound. As to operational control – what you can see easily from the circumstantial evidence of their media operations and the sort of less transparent but still available information about particular operations that have come out of that area is that they are operating with some impunity. And they are communicating with each other and they’re making videos without worrying about it much. So he’s clearly in the communications loop. Whether he’s briefed once a month or whether he’s consulted about authority for particular operations – it’s not clear how much he’s CEO and how much he’s chairman of the board. But he’s got to be in the communications loop.

Would Osama ever allow himself to be taken alive?
Doubtful. He says that he is determined to die a martyr. He is surrounded by guys with guns who think he should die a martyr. I’m not sure that he has the personal courage to take his own life or to sacrifice himself if he had the choice to be captured. But I think the decision would likely be taken out of his hands. Both by the attackers and by his bodyguards.

When you say that about his personal courage, do you say that based on any anecdotes from his biography?
Well, if you read the accounts of his performance in battle he was certainly brave and he has stood fast under fire. But he also loves life and I think would theologically be worried about the consequences of an ill-judged martyrdom. But when you look at the moments in the fall of 2001 when he wrote and spoke about his imminent death, which he believed was coming, he didn’t embrace it with the enthusiasm of a martyr. He sounded truly miserable about leaving this earth. If he had the opportunity to talk himself into the idea of a trial, or that God had called him to keep going, he might take that option.

Would you say that Osama bin Laden has outplayed the US in the information war?
He has outplayed the US on the information war by several orders of magnitude. Some of his advantages are structural. He is a small entrepreneurial media visionary, really, someone who has innovated in media since the 1980s. He was making YouTube-style fundraising videos 15 years before YouTube. He got satellite television and its power in the Arab world as a way to work around regime-control long before the United States understood what was happening or the regimes did. And he even got to the Web in a place that was not the most wired in the world, pretty early, and used it pretty effectively. But he’s a private sector actor and an entrepreneur, so the digital transformation and satellite television were made for people like him, if they’re talented.

You paint such a comprehensive portrait of Osama in The Bin Ladens, his limited education, his reduced role in the family and its businesses, his religious evolution in Afghanistan and all the history surrounding him, that you humanize him. Did this lead to any sympathy on your part for him?
Well certainly understanding. I did try to empathize with him, that is, to put myself in his shoes and try to see the world through his experience. I found him, however, frustratingly narrow in his outlook over the course of his life and one-dimensional and stubborn in ways that made it hard to write about him. His family was full of complexity and full of people with many dimensions. His brothers were very interesting because of the contradictions they tried to manage in their lives. There is a core stubbornness and anger and determination and, I suppose his followers would say, courage; an uncompromising courage that I came away mystified by to some extent. So many other people at the intersections of his life would have chosen differently. He always chose the extreme and, of course, his indifference to his victims and his rationalizing of the violence that he sponsored in theological terms also is something I found frustrating and inaccessible.

Your portrait of Salem bin Laden is particularly larger than life, charming, almost marvelous. But he died in a plane crash in 1988. I imagine that you regret not having met him.
Very much, yeah. I felt I did get to know him – to a greater degree than I understood Osama – through all the people who knew him and their recollections of him. I wish he had lived. It would have probably been a different world if he had.

How so?
A lot of people who knew Salem impressed upon me the view that had he had lived, 9/11 would never have happened. Because at a certain stage in the 90s when Osama was going off the reservation, Salem would have had the personality and the determination to bring this to an end. If that meant going to Sudan and bundling Osama up in a sack and bringing him back to Saudi Arabia, that’s what he would have done.  He wouldn’t have allowed Osama to destroy or put in jeopardy what the family had built over two generations, and he simply wouldn’t have tolerated Osama’s war with the US, where Salem was so invested in so many ways.

In Ghost Wars you wrote the history of Afghanistan under the Russians, the mujahideen, US involvement, the warlords, Pakistan’s nurturing of the Taliban and then the events of 9/11. It’s a dark and depressing story for almost everyone involved. Do you see hope for Afghanistan now?
A lot of hopeful things have happened for Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. The country has tried to reclaim its own independence and has brought home from exile many hundreds of thousands of Afghans who have been forced by the wars of the previous 20 years to leave their country, and the project of recreating an independent and viable Afghanistan is still moving forward. It may now be moving sideways. But it hasn’t yet been abandoned by the great majority of Afghans. The problem in Afghanistan over the last 30 years has been made of several parts but always present has been outside interference in the country’s affairs. It started with the Soviet invasion; it was compounded by the US, Pakistani and Saudi covert action program. Since then, Iran and Uzbekistan and Pakistan and others keep coming back trying to control this intersection in Central Asia. That, as much as the failure to build a culture of governance and viable politics, is what holds Afghanistan back still.

You spoke about coming to understand Osama bin Laden. I spent several days in a madrassa in Bannu on the edge of the tribal areas where John Walker Lindh was radicalized and I began to understand the lure of the simple life. The whole day is focused on food, water, prayer – a life especially attractive for a young boy like Lindh, raised in the chaotic modern world of northern California.
It’s a mix of things, isn’t it? There is the lure of Islam, which like all great religions has at its core a very attractive beauty and an organizing principle that speaks to human need. If your mind is at all open to any of the great religions and you just sit still in the universe they create for their followers, you can see the appeal in principle. That there is a shape to it, there is a fullness, a completeness and as you say, it has a set of orders that protect you from the challenges of the modern world. I suspect that it felt like that even when the world wasn’t as noisy and plugged in and wired and demanding as it is now.

But the thing that is interesting about John Walker Lindh and some of these war-fighting madrassas and the al Qaeda movement and the organizations around it is that the call is not only to simplicity and order. It’s to war. It’s to revenge. It’s to sacrifice. It’s to justice. It’s a narrative of action and redemption for young men. There is a call to enlistment that I think has a universal quality. It’s just dressed up in a particular narrative of theology and martyrdom that to the outside looks particularly brutal. But some of its qualities are similar to the call to enlistment that has been made in many societies since the dawn of civilization.

Pakistan itself has really suffered through the history you recounted in Ghost Wars. And post-Musharraf it’s arguably less stable since any time since 1972. Would you agree?
I agree that the country is unstable and it has become progressively more unstable since about 2006. But I would trace the instability to the failure of Musharraf’s rule as well as to the unresolved competition within the country to power and political access. That competition has been going on for 50 or 60 years and never really settled down into a stable constitutional arrangement. It is now compounded by something that while not completely without precedent in Pakistan’s troubled history is pretty new and distinctive: this Islamist insurgency by the Taliban and the Pashtun along the west, joined by other Islamists from non-Pashto speaking areas. There have been other revolts against the Pakistani state and others that question its legitimacy but none that have quite gotten to this point or have spoken to the core identity of Islam and statehood that is Pakistan’s founding idea. This is a dangerous insurgency. I don’t think there is any prospect that it’s going to seize control of the Pakistani state any time soon, but you do start to realize this is a darker period.  Even in a dark history. There is something qualitatively different about it and worrisome.

Is the US-Pakistan relationship crumbling?
Well, it’s in a bad condition. And I guess you could say that it is crumbling from where it was four or five years ago.

How painful was it to write Ghost Wars and simultaneously manage the Washington Post?
[Laughs] Well, it was joyful most of the time. I loved what I was doing. I was very energized. I felt engaged in something that was important personally and professionally. The painful part was writing it. I found that doing the research and reporting, while difficult and challenging, it never really qualified as painful. And of course I love writing. The actual experience of sitting and composing is uplifting most of the time. But you can research in two-hour chunks. You can weave it into your calendar. With writing you need six or eight-hour blocks and it’s hard to find those when you’re doing a job like that. So I ended up having to get up in the middle of the night and write in the darkness of the winter.

What kind of hours are we talking?
Oh, I’d get up at three or four and write for seven hours and then go into work and then collapse and take a day to recover and then do it again. And then work on the weekends straight through. I had this office that was on a loading dock. A friend had given it to me for cheap, and it had no windows. It was a concrete closed room, and I put up all these maps of Afghanistan and my Masood carpets and I had all these classified and declassified documents sitting on the floor, and it was right after 9/11, and I just figured someone is going to come in here and clean this room, and I’m going to end up in Guantanamo.

In your last two books you’ve dealt with the nature and use of political power in Saudi Arabia, a monarchy, in Pakistan, a democracy and a dictatorship, and American power under two very different presidents, Bill Clinton and George Bush. What are the broad lessons you’ve learned about political power?
Well its uses are changing radically and fast. I think the narrative that leads to 9/11 – and to some extent the narrative after 9/11 – shows that the power of states to coerce, which has been a big part of human history over the last few centuries, is eroding really fast. And all kinds of surprising individuals and organizations, if they have the talent and the drive as Osama bin Laden did, can wield power and create sources of power in new ways and really challenge formal organizations and governments right down to their shoelaces – as the United States has discovered. And that’s not all bad. A lot of the power that is created in this way, like at Google, assuming they’re really not evil as they claim, or at Human Rights Watch, a lot of sources of power have been created in constructive contexts and creative contexts. But we still think of our history and our contests in the old ways. Kings and governments sending armies into the field to combat each other over borders that are agreed in treaty rooms. I think the one thing those two books have left with me is this idea that that’s not really what power is anymore.