Steve Coll

Attended a lecture by Steve Coll. He researched my favorite anecdote ever about the invasion of Afghanistan and tracking Osama bin Laden right after 9/11. Apparently a CIA operative was following Osama on horseback high up into the Himalayas for days on end. He was not sleeping, they were above the tree line so there was nothing for his horse to eat, and, worst of all, he was incredibly sore from riding in a wooden saddle. So CIA guy pops open his satellite phone and calls headquarters. Langley then calls the Air Force in Missouri, where B-2 stealth bombers are based. They load up a saddle and a few bales of hay, then fly half-way around the world, refueling in flight, and drop a payload of equestrian supplies on some lonely, craggy mountaintop.

Anyway, I was fascinated by how articulate, levelheaded, and analytical Steve was. One of the most telling incidents was when a French woman heckled Steve with a question along the lines of “how can you talk about terror if you don’t talk about US drone attacks on civilians in Afghanistan.” The woman was not particularly articulate and her question came out haltingly and poorly formed. The most cringe-worthy aspect of the whole affair, however, was that the heckler was clearly a novice and quite nervous. When she spoke, her quavering voice and shaking hands betrayed her.

Instead of finding some way to dismiss what she was saying, Steve slowed down, thought about the question, rephrased it like someone with 20 years of professional writing experience would phrase it, and then answered the question honestly. His response was basically: “That is a good question. If you look at the polling done from Indonesia to Morocco, you can see that Osama bin Laden has lost some of his popular support because of his use of violence against Muslim civilians. However, if you look carefully at the polling, what you see is not a repudiation of bin Laden and a support of the United States. Instead you see that most mainstream Muslims oppose the indiscriminate killing of civilians for larger political purposes—whether those purposes be a legally sanctioned war against Al Qaeda’s extremism or Al Qaeda’s use of violence against states that are cooperating with the West.”

In short, his answer was, you are right, it does have an effect, and the US would be ill-advised not to carefully consider the impact of these drone attacks. Most of the Muslim world is solidly in the incredibly radical stop-killing-people-for-political-purposes camp.