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

and ideas for the book took shape while collaborating with other writers, in particular Paul Cruickshank and Katherine Tiedemann, and also Laurence Footer, Michael Lind, Swati Pandey, Alec Reynolds, and Sameer Lalwani. Thanks to you all. Additional thanks to Richard Clarke, who solicited two papers on terrorism for the July 2008 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and to Brian Fishman—then at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center—for commissioning a chapter in the 2008 publication
Bombers, Bank Accounts, and Bleedout: Al-Qa’ida’s Road In and Out of Iraq.
    Thanks also to all those who agreed to be interviewed for the book. Some of those who were interviewed are leading writers, scholars, and practitioners in the field whose work has been influential on mine, and many of whom have helped me in a myriad of other ways. Their names can be found in the list of interviewees on pages 353–356.
    Thanks to Joel Rayburn and Emma Sky for your hospitality and insights in Iraq. In Afghanistan, thanks to Khalid Mafton, Yusuf Masoud, Hamid Hamidullah, and the staff at Gandamack Lodge and in particular to Peter and Hassina Jouvenal. Peter and Richard Mackenzie were my guides on my first trip to Afghanistan in 1993; thanks to you both for almost two decades of friendship. In Pakistan, thanks for repeated help over the years to Rahimullah Yusufzai, Ismail Khan, Jamal Ismail, Imtiaz Ali, and Declan Walsh. Thanks for the hospitable welcome and insights I was given in Saudi Arabia by Khaled Batarfi and Saad al-Jabri. In Egypt thanks to Reem Nada for your help on and off over the past decade. In Milan, thanks to Leo Sisti for your sage advice, and in London to Mohammed al-Shafey for your help.
    I have worked at CNN in one capacity or another since 1990 and am grateful to continue to work there today with so many of its excellent reporters, executives, producers, and editors—in particular, David Doss, Kathy Slobogin, Cliff Hackel, Ken Shiffman, Pamela Sellars, Rick Davis, Richard Galant, and Steve Turnham. A special thanks to Charlie Moore, Anderson Cooper, and Phil Littleton for the various trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan we have taken in the past several years. Thanks also to Henry Schuster, now at CBS’s
60 Minutes
, who has been a friend and colleague for a decade and a half.
    Thanks to Carsten Oblaender of Storyhouse Productions with whom I have worked on four intellectually stimulating documentaries about various aspects of the “war on terror.” And thanks to producer Simon Epstein who helped me to better understand the world of IEDs. And at Discovery thanks to Bill Smee, Ed Hersh, and Ron Simon. Some of the reporting for this book first took shape in a number of different magazines and newspapers. Thanks to Cullen Murphy at the
Atlantic
, Paul Glastris at
Washington Monthly
, Adam Katz at
The Nation
, Gideon Rose at
Foreign Affairs
, Marie Arana, Warren Bass, and Jonathan Pomfret at
The Washington Post
, David Shipley and Tobin Harshaw at
The New York Times
, Bobby Ghosh at
Time
, David Goodhart at
Prospect
, Will Dana at
Rolling Stone
, and Monika Bauerlein at
Mother Jones
. At
Vanity Fair
, thanks to Graydon Carter, Chris Garrett, Wayne Lawson, and Cullen Murphy for taking a continuing interest in my work on al-Qaeda.
    In addition to those reporters acknowledged elsewhere in this book, the work of thefollowing was especially helpful in reconstructing the events of the “war on terror”—at the
New York Times
: Mark Mazzetti, Scott Shane, Eric Schmitt, Pir Zubair Shah, Jane Perlez, Peter Baker, Carlotta Gall, C.J. Chivers, Dexter Filkins, Alissa Rubin, Jeffrey Gettleman, and David Rohde, and at the
Washington Post
: Craig Whitlock, Joby Warrick, Sudarsan Raghavan, Karen DeYoung, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Peter Finn, Barton Gellman, Walter Pincus, Dana Priest, and Bob Woodward.
    Teaching graduate students at Harvard and at Johns Hopkins University has been instrumental in helping to form my