Peter Bergen Quotes

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born revolutionary who is believed by most Arab and Iranian observers to be the inspiration of the attacks in New York and Washington, is the best known of the Islamic militants to have emerged in the past 20 years and the least difficult to fathom.

Bin Laden is remarkably eager for Americans to know why he doesn't like us, what he intends to do about it and then following up and doing something about it in terms of military actions.

Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, as well as Abu Musab Zarqawi, have made it quite clear in their internal propaganda that they cannot win unless they can drive the Americans out. And they know that they can't do that there, so they've brought the battlefield to the halls of Congress.

A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S.

Osama bin Laden, who is a Saudi, feels himself to be a patriot because the U.S. has forces in Saudi Arabia, which is sacred because it is the land of the prophet Mohammed.

Osama bin Laden is going after us to get us out of the region, so he can deal with the regimes that he sees in the region, or replace them with purists.

Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.

Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11.

Afghanistan is where much of the al Qaeda journey began. It is the main site where Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and their cohort rose to prominence fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. Afghan territory holds special significance to the group, which is committed to retaking it and re-establishing it as the base of a global movement.

We know from the material that was recovered from the bin Laden compound that bin Laden was looking at the 10th anniversary of 9/11 as an opportunity to strike yet again at the U.S. homeland.

After America won the Cold War, some believed we had come to the 'end of history,' and budget-cutters celebrated the so-called 'peace dividend.' As a result, we ignored the toxic mixture of militant Islam and terror that ultimately led to 9/11.

Osama bin Laden organized an attack that was carried out against the United States, New York, Pentagon, and the other aircraft, with 19 attackers, 19 guys with box cutters. An attack that probably cost almost nothing.

Sudan expelled bin Laden on May 18, 1996, to Afghanistan.

Before 9/11, absolutely, there were concerns about terrorism; but the world fundamentally changed.

The image we have of bin Laden in his final years in Abbottabad is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself; just another suburban dad flipping though the channels with his remote.

Of course there is a tie between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. These are strong ties, because the Taliban gave up Afghanistan for the sake of Al-Qaeda. There are still Al-Qaeda youth here, in Afghanistan. The Taliban is willing to accompany Al-Qaeda to any country in order to wage Jihad there. they want to establish Allah's law everywhere. Our religion is one, and we will remain together.

Before 9-11 Osama Bin Laden trained more terrorists than we trained FBI agents.

We’d better get Bin Laden. The failure to get Bib Laden fuels Moslem fundamentalism and serves as a recruiting tool for our enemies.

Many people would like Osama bin Laden … to hurt America, but they do not want bin Laden to rule their children.

Every Arab government supports the causes which inspired 9-11.

Al Qaeda’s presence in Pakistan and Yemen … is facilitated less by the states’ weakness than by the ruling regime’s unwillingness to combat Islamic extremism—and indeed, their decision to embrace jihadi groups.

What bin Laden had hoped to achieve in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 period, which was to drag the United States into a protracted guerrilla war like the one he had fought against the Soviets, never happened. Instead, that protracted guerrilla war is now playing out in Iraq, in the heart of the Middle East.

Bin Laden was intelligent, well-informed, and low key. The people around him treated him with great deference, calling him 'sheikh,' a term of respect.

When news of the first plane's hitting the World Trade Center reached them, bin Laden's followers exploded with joy. But shrewder members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan realized that the attacks might not be the stunning victory that bin Laden, and many in the West, took them to be.

Before 9/11, al-Qaeda was an organization of global reach.