Could it happen again?

• Author: Bergen, Peter
• Position: 9/11/06: Five Years On: A Symposium

GIVEN THE scale of the damage caused to the United States, the 9/11 attacks neither required much money to execute, nor did they take a large number of plotters. Terrorism is a cheap form of warfare--the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, for instance, only cost a few thousand dollars. This is particularly the case when you have a cadre of young men willing to engage in suicidal terrorism. According to court documents entered in the trial of Al-Qaeda's Zacarias Moussaoui, the entire 9/11 operation cost a little over $200,000, a trivial sum considering the damage it inflicted on the United States. Furthermore, no amount of money will buy you 19 young men willing to commit suicide in a terrorist operation. The pilots who flew the hijacked planes into two of the world's most famous buildings saw what they were doing as an act of worship.

The success of the attacks relied above all on the faith of the hijackers that they were doing God's will. Al-Qaeda's strength lies not in its material resources, which are relatively trivial, but in the nature of its beliefs. Unfortunately, since 9/11 we have seen the Al-Qaeda ideological virus spread widely, partly as a result of the war in Iraq. The spread of that virus can be gauged by an epidemic of suicide terrorism around the world that first spiked in 2003, and has reached unprecedented proportions in the past year from Afghanistan to Iraq to the United Kingdom to Egypt.

The 9/11 Commission report makes clear that one of the reasons the attacks succeeded was that Osama bin Laden intervened to make two key decisions that ensured their success. The first was to appoint Mohamed Atta to be the lead hijacker. Atta would carry out his responsibilities with grim efficiency. The second decision was to rein in the operational commander of 9/11, Khaled Sheik Mohammed (KSM), who planned for ten planes to crash into targets both on the East Coast and simultaneously in Asia. Bin Laden reasoned that so many attacks would be hard to synchronize and might lead to the failure of the entire plan.

During the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, interrogation summaries obtained from KSM he had been captured in Pakistan in late 2003--were entered into evidence. In those summaries KSM outlined the dictatorial powers that Bin Laden exercised over his organization:

If the Shura (consultative) council at Al-Qaeda, the highest authority in the organization, had a majority of 98 percent on a resolution and it is opposed by Bin Laden, he has the right to cancel the resolution. Bin Laden's total dominance of Al-Qaeda meant it was hostage to his strategic vision, and that became a problem for the organization because Bin Laden's cult-like control over Al-Qaeda is not matched by any depth of strategic insight. Bin Laden's analysis of American foreign policy is based on the U.S. pull out from Lebanon in 1983, after the Marine barracks attack that killed 241 American servicemen, and the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia in 1993, after 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in Mogadishu. From these American retreats, Bin Laden concluded the...