The Longest War by Peter L. Bergen Read Free Book Online

“In the Footsteps of bin Laden.” Aired August 23, 2006.
    CNN, “Terror Nation”, January 1994.
    Discovery/Times Channel, “Mission Ops: Assignment IEDs.” Aired May 15, 2007. Story House Productions.
    Discovery/Times Channel, “Al-Qaeda 2.0.” Aired March 25, 2003. Story House Productions.
    Yosri Fouda. “Top Secret: The Road to September 11.” Al-Jazeera (Qatar). Aired September 11, 2002.
    Home Box Office, “The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl,” 2006.
    National Geographic, “Holy War, Inc.” Story House Productions, 2001.
    National Geographic, “Blinding Horizon: Osama Bin Laden’s Quest for the Bomb.” Story House Productions, 2003.
    PBS Frontline, “Obama’s War” (2009); “Bush’s War” (2007); “The Dark Side” (2006); “Chasing the Sleeper Cell” (2003); “Campaign Against Terror” (2002); “Gunning for Saddam” (2001); “Loose Nukes” (1996).

Acknowledgments
 
    N o book is an island, and this one certainly wasn’t. Katherine Tiedemann worked on all phases of this book: performing and organizing research, making important editorial suggestions, fact-checking and footnoting all of the material, and doing photo research. It was my good fortune to have found someone as smart and well-organized as Katherine to work on this book and to have worked with every day for the past three years at the New America Foundation. Katherine is going on to do her Ph.D. in political science at George Washington University and has a very bright future ahead of her.
    The New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., has been my home for almost a decade and I’m grateful to Steve Clemons for bringing me on board. And I am especially lucky to work there with Steve Coll, who read a draft of this book and made some typically acute suggestions about how to improve it significantly. It is a privilege to work with Steve whose smarts and self-effacement are legendary in a town that rarely sees much of those qualities in combination. Thanks also to my other New America colleagues: Brian Fishman, who had helpful feedback on the manuscript, and Patrick Doherty, whom I work with every day on some of the issues that are discussed in this book. And thanks to Simone Frank, Danielle Maxwell, Andrew Lebovich, Matt Caris, and Christina Satkowski.
    Ken Ballen, a leading pollster in the Muslim world, read the manuscript not once but twice and had many important suggestions about how to improve it. Similarly, the security expert Andy Marshall made key editorial observations about how to conceptualize the book. The financial historian Liaquat Ahamed and his wife, Meena, also made helpful suggestions about the manuscript. Karen Greenberg at New York University’s Center on Law and Security had useful ideas about improvements to the book and has been a great supporter. Karen’s annual counterterrorism conference at La Pietra in Florence is a constant source of new ideas and connections. Thanks also to Stephen Holmes at NYU.
    Some of the reporting for this book first appeared in
The New Republic
. I am grateful to editor Franklin Foer for that opportunity. The magazine’s executive editor, RichardJust, made my pieces much better and had some excellent ideas about improvements to this book. Meaghan Rady Pesavento, a former student of mine at Harvard, took time out of her busy life to read the manuscript and had a host of ideas about ways to sharpen the manuscript.
    Thanks to Jane Mayer, Lawrence Wright, and James Riesen who looked over the manuscript and whose work in the field, along with Steve Coll’s, has been foundational. Thomas Hegghammer, a leading scholar of jihadism, reviewed the manuscript as did Stephen Tankel, an expert on jihadist groups. Gary Ackerman, an authority on the intersection between terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, reviewed the chapter on WMD. I’m very grateful to all of you, while any errors of fact and interpretation remain, of course, my own.
    Some of the reporting