All right, folks, I want to thank you all for coming. I'm Raul Grecht. I'm a senior fellow at FDD. I think you probably have already, perhaps, seen the bios on these gentlemen, so I don't think there's any great need to introduce them. I would just like to say this. I met Peter just after the attack on the USS Cole in Aden. Actually, we were in Sana, I think, and where we met. And I have to say that I truly admired what Peter was doing. He'd given up a rather remunerative job at CNN to follow his passion on Al-Qaeda. And for all of you folks who haven't actually sort of jumped into the cold sea of trying to write a book for the very first time, it's a bit of scary project, particularly if you're in some land like Yemen, trying to make sense out of it all. And I greatly admired him then for doing that. And I still do. Washington is not a city blessed with that many intrepid souls. Now, Peter had written something for the New York Times magazine right after the death of Al-Qaeda, which, of course, caught my interest. It essentially said that Al-Qaeda was toast. And I remember I sent an email to Peter at that time, asking him since he was superannuating his profession, did he have any intention of committing seppuku? And to make a long story short, we went back and forth, and this little discussion debate is a product of that dialogue. Now, I want to say that in this debate we're going to have, we're going to play by Oxford rules, which means that all of you will be asked to sort of vote your preferences for the resolution against the resolution or undecided. Since I used to be in the CIA, and I'm quite familiar with cheating, I suggest that you not cheat and vote one way and then flip your vote so you can win by Oxford rules, because it is the movement of that vote that designates the winner of today. So I think you are aware of what the resolution is that essentially it is Al-Qaeda dead. It is no longer a threat. And for the motion, we're going to start with Tom, Thomas Lynch, and he will lead off. And then Tom too. Tom Jocelyn will follow, and we'll take it from there. Each speaker will have seven minutes in the beginning. Tom, to you. Thanks very much, Raul, and thanks to all of you for coming here today. Let me stand so I make sure I can be heard in the back so we've got a few further back there. As Raul mentioned, I'm a research fellow over at National Defense University and the Institute for Strategic Studies there. And so I must make this opening statement. The opinions I'm going to express right now are, of course, my own, and don't represent the opinions or the positions of my direct employer, National Defense University, or the Department of Defense for the United States government. If I may, let me also offer a little bit of context for those of you that may have skimmed my bio in terms of some personal background related to my time in working on this topic, as well as my other research portfolio areas of South Asia and the Near East. Before retiring from the military in 2010 to assume the position I'm in now and pursue scholarly research on these topics, I did spend my last six and a half to seven years in uniform directly interacting with the Jihadi threat while living and working in the country's impacted most by that threat. I served most of the year in Afghanistan with military special assistant to our then ambassador there, Zalmay Khalazad in 2004, was then special assistant to John Abizade, the commander of SENTCOM, where he asked me to look in his blind spots as he was focusing on Iraq. So that meant I was living and working a lot in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Djibouti, and Somalia. I then went to Qatar, spent two years in a command position in the army where I was responsible for the force protection against Jihadi attacks of US military and civilian personnel in both Qatar and Saudi Arabia, as well as later in United Arab Emirates. And finally, I concluded my career as a special military assistant to Admiral Mike Mullen for South Asian counterterrorism efforts, which allowed me to, again, travel and spend a lot of time in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. So in each of these roles, I've seen the faces of al-Qaeda. I've seen its parent ideology. And I've seen the practical sense about what they present to us as a challenger and issue. And it's in this sense that I stand here today resolved with Peter Bergen that al-Qaeda is in fact defeated. And let me explain that. We contend here today that what we have known as al-Qaeda since 9-11 and feared is in fact defeated. Severely eroded before the May 2011 death of Osama bin Laden in Abadabad, the organization and its global reach, which was worthy of the kind of mystique and obsession and expense that's commanded our attention for more than a decade, that was already eroded. And I argue to you, as I think Peter does as well, that we still underestimate and under-appreciate the significance of bin Laden's death to the essence of what al-Qaeda was. Bin Laden as a personality was no less relevant to turning the ideology of Salafi jihadism, and I'll come back to Salafi jihadism in a second, into a globally threatened movement than Lenin was to Marxist Bolshevism, turning what had been a mixture of trade units and politicians into a threatening, violence-wetted communist ideology. Much like Lenin was for global communism, bin Laden was a unique visionary combining charisma and ability to communicate and an ability to creatively fuse disparate and diffuse factions with a Salafi jihadi predisposition into something galvanized and formidable and indeed focused on places like New York, Washington, D.C., London, and Madrid, Spain. The unique and acute problem that was al-Qaeda therefore was its credible ability, which existed for a while, but it's no longer extant, to bring together the wider elements of the Salafi jihadi movement and focus it on out-of-area strikes and attacks. We argue today, I think as senior al-Qaeda scholars have since before 9-11, that there were five elements in bin Laden's al-Qaeda that made it historically unique and a severe threat. First, it aspired to be a core organization dedicated to planning, recruiting, and training for and organizing, and this is the important word, for catastrophic, globally-oriented terror, all right? And that was for the purpose of driving Westerners out of Muslim lands. Second, it was to serve as a vanguard for organizing and coordinating already-existing, local and regionally-focused jihadist groups, and might I add, jihadist groups in the 1990s were killing in the tens of thousands in countries like Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, and India to organize those into a wedded-focused cohesive element focusing on American Zionist crusaders, as they refer to them in the Middle East. Again, for the purpose of driving Westerners out of Muslim lands. Third, and though a lesser aim to serve as an inspiration and a focal point for disaffected lone-wolf Muslims worldwide to act out on their frustrations in a violent way in Western countries. Again, for the purpose of driving Westerners out of Muslim lands. Fourth, and I think very important, al-Qaeda of bin Laden aspired to serve as a brand name, representing the very highest kind and level of Salafi jihadi ideology, bringing together successful violence against outside elements into this fused, organized element, focusing on crusader governments, okay? And here there was this kind of notional, mystical mystique surrounding bin Laden. This notion that he had impunity, that the long arm of Western justice or international law could not catch up with and make him pay the ultimate price for his activities. And fifth, and I think important, and I'll come back to this in question and answer, that al-Qaeda would serve as the base for the conquest of Afghanistan. An element in an area that had a mystical lore in terms of how al-Qaeda perceived and conceived of itself. Now I argue to you as I think my partner does as well, Peter here, that these five essential elements of bin Laden's al-Qaeda, three of them were devastated by May 2011 and the nature of the raid in Abadabad. First, the notion of al-Qaeda as a brand name that it was free from retribution, that came falling down dramatically by the way in which the raid occurred and the finality in which bin Laden was settled. Second, the idea and the essence of al-Qaeda as the premier Salafi jihadist organization able to plan, recruit and conduct successful overseas terrorist operations has been put asunder in the last five to six years. You know, we can all point to things that have been planned in Pakistan, but as my partner will show in his comments, the success rate in Western countries by bin Laden's al-Qaeda in terms of its planning and franchising activities has been very minuscule in the years, especially since 2006. And finally, there was this critical notion of al-Qaeda as a base for certain success in Afghanistan. And this, too, has been dashed, particularly since when one looks at bin Laden's current successor, Zawahiri. Zawahiri has nowhere near the relations or the affiliations that matter a lot to the uncomfortable but managed relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And I think that's an important notion here such that al-Qaeda cannot itself right now be the ones to claim success in any ultimate victory should that occur. And I'm not forecasting it, but should that occur in Afghanistan? So where does that leave us? I think where it leaves us is with about two of the five key dimensions of bin Laden's al-Qaeda that we legitimately have to worry about. But these two, I would argue to you, are not new, nor were they ever the exclusive purview of bin Laden's al-Qaeda. Indeed, a conduct of wider regional and local acts of terrorism and violence in Muslim countries by groups or individuals inspired toward the Salafi-Jahadi ideology remains relevant. Only we must now get our heads around approaching this differently. Without the fear or the overreaction that was required when there seemed to be a competent and complete base known as al-Qaeda. As I've already mentioned, we need to understand that there is no psychological successor to bin Laden. Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaeda, does not have the charisma, the connections, or the purposeful focus on out-of-area attacks and operations that bin Laden did. And my partner will address that, I think, a little bit in his formal remarks. Next, when you take away bin Laden from the bin Laden-Zawahiri team that made al-Qaeda what it was in terms of a global organization, then you're left with a different managerial problem. And one that I will contend needs less stark Western vocabulary and less overseas military presence to deal with. A much more intelligence-based, legal cooperation-based focus to deal with the local and regional manifestations of Salafi-Jahadism. Thus, I argue to you that our terrorism worries of today are different than those of a decade ago. And we need to take a different tactical approach. And Peter and I argue, therefore, that the relevant dimensions of al-Qaeda's failed effort to co-op Salafi-Jahadism is, in fact, significant and is, in fact, something that should influence our understanding and our tracking of what remains as a terrorist threat but not one that is of the manifestation or the concern that it was a decade ago. I believe, therefore, and I stand resolved with Peter Bergen that we should understand, at this point, that al-Qaeda, the al-Qaeda of bin Laden is defeated, all right? And that we need to take special skill and care moving forward to have less focus on applying military force whenever and whenever, however we suspect, the ideology of jihadism manifesting itself in the Muslim world. And instead, need to focus much more on special operations, partnerships with other Muslim countries, increased intelligence and a coordination with law enforcement at local levels to address the far less threatening form of terrorism that is now dominant in Salafi-Jahadism movement, one that bin Laden has tried but failed to co-opt. Thank you very much. I just wanna say that applause is welcome at any time, booze or not. Oh, yeah, I'll now turn to my colleague and good friend, Thomas Jocelyn. So the motion is defeated, okay? Well, when I first started preparing my remarks today, when I first did was I went back to a port that was actually published in September of 2011 by the two commissioners who headed the 9-11 commission, and I believe, Pierre, you were on this team as well, to actually update the US government and the American public on exactly where we stand. They addressed the issue of whether or not Al-Qaeda is dead. Here's what that report said. Although Osama bin Laden is dead, Al-Qaeda is not. It is a network, not a hierarchy. Over a period of years, Al-Qaeda has been very adaptive and resilient. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates will almost certainly attempt to avenge his death, however, they will not necessarily attack soon. Al-Qaeda's capabilities to implement large-scale attacks are less formidable than they were 10 years ago, but Al-Qaeda and its affiliates continue to have the intent and reach to kill dozens or even hundreds of Americans in a single attack. That was just over a year ago. And a report published by the two 9-11 commissioners, the two co-chairs, and again, if Pierre was on that team as well, some other experts. So just a year ago, this official report was saying that Al-Qaeda is actually alive and survived bin Laden's death, but now I want to flash forward to July of this year, the country reports on terrorism which the State Department put out. What's the official position of the State Department in the U.S. government and the Obama administration? Is it that Al-Qaeda is dead? No. Here's what the State Department said in July of this year. Despite blows in Western Pakistan, Al-Qaeda, its affiliates and its adherents remain adaptable. They have shown resilience, retained the capability to conduct regional and transnational attacks, and thus constitute an enduring and serious threat to our national security. That's the official position of the United States government, United States State Department, is that Al-Qaeda is not defeated. Official position of the Obama administration. Now, if you want to go through, I can go through a whole bunch of quotes from senior officials, including Matthew Olson, National Counterterrorism Center, and a bunch of others along the same lines. They'll tell you, as you'll hear these gentlemen say, that in fact, Al-Qaeda has suffered some blows. Absolutely. Bin Laden's death hurt them. Absolutely. Other blows along the lines have hurt them, including the killing of other senior Al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. But I keep coming back to what that report in September of 2011 said. It's a network, not a hierarchy. And so when we follow the network, what do we find? Well, you heard Tom say that Mr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri doesn't have quite the pull or the cachet that Osam Bin Laden did. Well, in fact, every single one of the Al-Qaeda affiliates swore allegiance to Zawahiri and Al-Qaeda. All of them did. They all came out and swore allegiance to Al-Qaeda and maintained their roles as part of the network. I'd like to talk a little bit about the affiliates now, just for a few minutes. The affiliates, this is a strategy that goes back a long, long time. And I think it's been misunderstood. And actually, my colleague Jonathan Shanzer is here. He actually wrote a book called Al-Qaeda's Armies, which I recommend to everybody because it shows that in fact, Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have been thinking about affiliates a long, long time ago. This was not something new. The affiliates have picked up some of the slack for Al-Qaeda. There's no doubt about it. My colleague, Bill, is going to talk, Rojo's going to talk a little bit more about Al-Qaeda central. But I'm going to focus on the affiliates. What we've seen with the affiliates, and has now been recognized by the Obama administration, is that they're growing. They're actually gaining turf, gaining ground around the world. Sometimes in some areas, they have taken a step back. In other areas, they're actually moving forward. Think about the Sahih and Libya and Northern Africa, for example. On September 26th, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the rise of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghrib and aligned movements actually represented a threat to not only the region and the many Muslims in the area, which is totally true, but also the world and others. European officials have said that AQIM actually poses a threat to France. You flash forward to Libya. In a report I actually had talked about and published articles about, in August of this year, the Library of Congress published a report in conjunction with the Pentagon that talked about Al-Qaeda's plan for Libya. That report details in great detail and great names and dates and all sorts of information, exactly how Al-Qaeda central leadership in Pakistan has planned to build a network inside Libya, and build it up to the point where it has a fully operational network.  You talk about these guys are going to talk about the success rate of Al-Qaeda hitting the homeland. Well, there actually been five plots against the American homeland, serious plots by Al-Qaeda and affiliated groups since 2009. One of them was by Najibullah Zazi, who wanted to bomb the New York City subways. That was diligent counterterrorism work broke that plot up. It wasn't luck, it wasn't luck in that case. In two other cases, diligent counterterrorism work broke up plots by Al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula, which hadn't even attacked us prior to 2009, or even attempted to attack us prior to 2009. A third plot by Al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula on Christmas Day 2009 was foiled because passengers on board a plane jumped on board a terrace before you get a second chance to detonate a suicide bomb. So as the President of the United States has said, 300 people would have been killed with that plane had blown up. A fifth plot was by the Pakistani Taliban in May 2010. The Pakistani Taliban, according to the bomb administration, according to the State Department, according to the Treasury Department, has a symbiotic relationship with Al-Qaeda, Pakistani Taliban. So these are five different plots against the U.S. homeland. Now what I would argue is, and this is where my argument is a little more nuanced the way you hear, that's not even what they've been focused on most of the time throughout their existence. When you actually study Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and allies, they've been focused mainly on fighting elsewhere. They spent most of their resources, most of their assets fighting elsewhere. That's what they spent most of their time doing. And they're doing that today. They keep doing that. They're focused on killing people and on trying to acquire territory and trying to disrupt local governments around the world. Part of what always gets me about this debate is we have sort of a very American-centric focus on these things. We think about, well, if they can't hit us, if they can't execute a spectacular attack against the U.S. homeland, that means that the threat has been depreciated at such a point that we don't need to worry about it. But the bottom line is, Tom had mentioned that tens of thousands of people have been killed throughout the 1990s by jihadists or Salafi jihadist groups. Well, the bottom line is that they're still killing thousands and thousands of people and wounding thousands and thousands more each year. When you look at Al-Qaeda's place, the official data from the National Counterterrorism Center says that in fact from 2008 to 2011, 35,524 people were killed. Those are mainly Muslims in foreign lands. That's who the primary victim of Al-Qaeda, it's affiliates, it's allies, it's adherents, it's the way it's phrased in the report. Those are their main victims. When we look at the Arab Spring, we look at the potential for going forward, what do we see? Well, we see some long-term potential, absolutely. We see areas where we see hope for millions of Muslims who have nothing to do with Al-Qaeda and reject Al-Qaeda. Absolutely, you can't look at this picture and not feel hopeful for them. However, it doesn't mean that Al-Qaeda doesn't have a hand to play. Al-Qaeda has exploited security vacuums in several countries. This is the official position in the US government. When you look at Yemen and how they've exploited the security position there, National Counterterrorism says they've explicitly exploited the security vacuum in Yemen as a result of the Arab Spring. You look in Libya, in Eastern Libya. There's now copious evidence of what Al-Qaeda's doing there. You look at various other areas throughout Northern Africa. You look at Syria, what do we see in Syria right now? Now, was that rebellion started by Al-Qaeda? Absolutely not. There are many Muslims in Syria that wanted Assad's terrible regime to fall and they deserve our sympathy and support. However, Al-Qaeda is attempting to exploit it and has. Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Syria have moved in with the force and are actually taking part in that rebellion and are expanding the scope of their suicide bombing campaigns. Just a few days ago, the Associated Press reported that Al-Qaeda is making a comeback in Iraq, that they're expanding their operations. And in fact, Al-Qaeda in Iraq is so much of a threat according to Al-Qaeda in Iraq's position is so much a threat both in Iraq and in Syria. As the Obama administration says, we can't support the good rebels in Syria because we're worried about Al-Qaeda's and Iraq's position in Syria, okay? When you look at the whole picture, the affiliates and all the countries I just listened, believe me, there are more. That's not the picture of an organization that's defeated. That's a picture of an organization, and I'll quote again, that is adaptive and resilient and is gonna keep fighting. And if we drop the ball and say, we're not gonna have a vigilance to keep this fight up, and then that means a lot more Muslims are gonna die and it means ultimately there's gonna be a lot more successful attacks against us. Thanks. Thank you. Peter Bergen-Devarlo. Thanks for organizing this and suggesting it. My connection to this subject began with the first trade center attack in 1993, which you recall killed six people. They went to Afghanistan to do an hour documentary about what was happening in Afghanistan. The documentary unfortunately made the successful prediction that Afghanistan would be sort of like Lebanon had been in the 80s, a source of terrorism and drugs in the future. And then I produced bin Laden's first television interview in which of course he declared war against the United States for the first time to a Western audience, and I've written four books about al-Qaeda. So from a sort of self-serving professional point of view, I have every reason to pretend this problem really is a big problem because I've devoted 20 years of my life to it, and I'm saying it isn't. I feel like a Sovietologist in 1989, and that's a good feeling. So Colonel Lynch and I, basically our main point is the following. We're not saying that jihadist terrorism is over, that would be a false claim. After all, jihadist terrorism has been around since, let me look at the assassins in the 12th century. It's been a form of violence, it's been around for a long time. What we're saying is that al-Qaeda is now defeated, incapable of its central strategic goal of mounting a large-scale terrorist attack in the United States. And Tom just gave you a recitation of five plots, relatively recent plots in the United States. What do they have in common? Well, they all failed. They all failed. Al-Qaeda's ability to attack the United States, even if it's affiliates, by Tom's own account is that they've been failures. And Tom is also saying that we're being too American-ocentric. Well, last time I checked, we're at the New America Foundation. I'm in charge of the National Security Studies Program. We are mostly Americans in this room. That's our central concern, is American national security, not other people's national security. You have a born in Mexico. I know. I was... It was born in Minneapolis. I have my passport right here, which I will bring out in a minute. I believe it. So it's not only al-Qaeda's own weaknesses, it's also our strengths, which are very dramatically different than they were on 9-11. On 9-11, there were 16 people on the no-fly list. Now there are 20,000. President under Barack Obama, 28 leaders of... And in fact, in the much of this data, it can be found on Bill Rogio's website. 28 leaders of al-Qaeda have been killed in Pakistan and Yemen. Under George W. Bush, at least a dozen, killed by drone strikes. As a result, we've got Aiman Al-Zawahiri, who's the last leader of al-Qaeda left. He's got a very tough road to hoe. He's inherited the blockbuster video of Global G had, and he's not gonna be able to turn it around. The last successful attack in the West was the 7-7 attacks in London, which killed 52 commuters. Since 9-11, 17 people have been killed in the United States by people motivated by jihadi ideas. 13 of them at Fort Hood, Texas. All of those are individual tragedies, of course. But in any given year, about two dozen Americans are killed by dogs.  So we don't have an irrational fear of bathtub drownings. We shouldn't have an irrational fear of terrorism. Pulling data across the Muslim world indicates that al-Qaeda's been losing the war of ideas for many, many years. Al-Qaeda's ideas and foot soldiers played a meaningful role in the Arab Spring, the most important development in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Bin Laden's death was greeted with only minor protests in the Muslim world. Yes, of course, al-Qaeda, you know, or we still, what happened in Benghazi is still not clear, but clearly a group, let's say, inspired by al-Qaeda's ideas did this attack. But at the end of the day, compared to 9-11, it's a rather minor victory for these guys, a successful attack by a group of heavily armed men on a lightly defended building in a country that's still in a chaotic state after the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. In addition, you know, in terms of the strengths that we have, on 9-11, there were just a handful of joint terrorism task forces, now they're more than 100. On 9-11, there was no National Counterterrorism Center. There was no TSA, there was no DHS. All of these things have made us a much harder target. Before 9-11, special operations forces were almost never employed against al-Qaeda and its allies. Now we have a dozen such missions every night in Afghanistan and other similar missions in countries like Yemen and Somalia. The public is in a very different posture. Who disarmed the passengers, disarmed Abdul Mutalib on the plane? It was the vendor in Times Square who noticed the smoking SUV that was Faisal Shazad's attempt to blow up a car bomb. So before 9-11, the CI and the FBI rarely communicated. Now they work closely together. And Tom brought up the question of the affiliates.  Look at al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. They've been turfed out of their towns in southern Yemen that they once controlled. Look at al-Shabaab. It has been basically completely rolled back in Somalia. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, what Tom fails to mention is al-Qaeda in Iraq controlled a third of Iraqi land mass in 2006. Now they're capable of doing some terrorist attacks in central Baghdad, but it's a very different kind of situation than controlling a third of the country. And other affiliates we could talk about, Boko Haram. Yes, it's a problem for Nigerians, but they've shown no ability or inclination or to do an attack outside Nigeria. So even these affiliates are not, none of them, most of them are not doing particularly well. And sort of just in summation, to win World War II, Roosevelt Churchill and Stalin didn't think it was necessary to kill every Nazi. And I think what our opponents are sort of suggesting is, for a single jihadi terrorist or even dozens that were walking the earth, somehow we're losing the war against al-Qaeda. Nothing could be further from the truth. Al-Qaeda's central strategic goal, as Colonel Lynch pointed out, getting us out of the Middle East, not only failed, it backfired. The United States is more involved in the Middle East and it's ever been in its history. Al-Qaeda, which of course means the base in Arabic, lost the best base it ever had in Afghanistan, has never recovered anything remotely close. Pre-911 churning out thousands of recruits in Afghanistan, running a sort of independent foreign policy from the Taliban, attacking our embassies. And of course, 9-11 itself. And I think 9-11 was misunderstood at the time in a sense. It was seen as the beginning of something. In fact, it was the end of something. And when 9-11 happened, a lot of people said this was Al-Pell Harbor. Well, it was, in fact, very similar to Pearl Harbor, but it was actually Al-Qaeda's Pearl Harbor. Just as Pearl Harbor led to the collapse of Imperial Japan, Al-Qaeda, like Al-Qaeda's attacks on 9-11 led to its strategic defeat, which has basically happened and was confirmed by the death of its leader and founder, bin Laden. And that is the proposition we're backing. Bill Roger. Thanks. Good afternoon and thanks all for joining us and thanks to Peter, Newman, and Tom and New America Foundation for hosting this event. I'm gonna take a couple of quick issues and then I'm gonna talk a little bit more about Al-Qaeda and in Afghanistan and Pakistan in particular, because these are two theaters where we initially focused on Al-Qaeda and its network immediately after the 9-11 attacks. But first of all, I wanna take issue with something. As Tom said, we have a tendency to focus on what Al-Qaeda wants to do with us. But Al-Qaeda has always looked at both the near enemy and the far enemy and has actually focused far more efforts, as Tom had said, on the near enemy. And what they do is they use this as a recruiting base. They use areas that they gain control of territory via their affiliates to train their operatives and a lot of them are used, yes, in conventional military operations locally, but as they did in the 1990s, they take those operatives and funnel them into some of those operatives, they select from them, put them in special camps and this is how we got the suicide bombers on 9-11 and multiple other terror attacks. On the issue of Salafist groups in Al-Qaeda, well, not only did the Al-Qaeda affiliates swear allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, but a whole slew of smaller, newly grown Salafist groups in Egypt and Gaza and other places, they've sworn allegiance to Zawahiri. So this notion that Zawahiri is some kind of old curmudgeon who's not well-liked in the jihadist community, I would just completely disagree with that and I think the fact that everyone rushed to his defense after the death of bin Laden and were quick to swear allegiance to him really refute to that point. And another quick point here, dogs and bathtubs, they don't plot attacks to kill Americans and Muslims as Al-Qaeda does. So these are different threats. This is an enemy that's active, that is operating on a timeframe, that we operate on a timeframe of the next election. They're looking at it 50 to 100 years. That's how they're looking at this. This may actually be a low point in Al-Qaeda's operations but that doesn't mean they're defeated. Now, Peter Bergen had mentioned that there's only one senior Al-Qaeda leader left. Yeah, I could point you to a list of all the Al-Qaeda leaders that we've killed in the drone strikes in Pakistan. The reality is, is there's several more senior Al-Qaeda leaders and I could stand here and I could point you to a list of those as well. One of them being Saif al-Adal and I could, again, I could go down the list of numerous Al-Qaeda operators that are believed to be operating in Pakistan. They're not just in Pakistan. They're moving out into other theaters and it's not just because of the drone strikes in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda, what it's done with the drone strikes is it's tried to spread out from those particular areas in the tribal agencies and it's, you know, but then again, Al-Qaeda's always had a base in larger Pakistan. Where do we detain Khaled Sheikh Mohammed? Where do we recently detain, or the Pakistanis recently detain the senior Al-Qaeda leader who was a member, who was his leader of his external operations. He was detained in Qata. So, look, there are, Zauhiri is not the last Al-Qaeda leader. Again, it's a network, it's not a hierarchy. And look, there's been 18 drone strikes in Pakistan since we killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was described as Al-Qaeda's number two, or it's in various other terms. A lot of these strikes are targeting senior Al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. Why are we targeting senior Al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan if we only have one left? We all know that Zauhiri is not hiding out in North and South Muziristan. Where did we kill Bin Laden? Where do we capture a whole slew of Al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan in major cities far, far from the tribal areas? Al-Qaeda is getting out of that kill box, a document released by Bin Laden said, look, we're gonna send our operatives, and he talked about hundreds of operatives. This was in December of 2010. We're gonna push them into Afghanistan. Qunar, Nuristan, Zabul, and Ghazni were areas that he suggested. You can see, based on ISAF's raids over the last several years, and I'll get into that a little bit closer, you can see that this is actually true. I mean, we target Al-Qaeda leaders throughout Afghanistan, particularly in Qunar, Nuristan, and other provinces. And again, other operatives have spread out to the affiliates, but this isn't just because of the drone strikes. Al-Qaeda has always used the affiliates to farm out some of its leaders. It's acted as a sort of a safe mechanism. The leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, for instance, was once Osama Bin Laden's aid to camp. Al-Qaeda in the Pakistani jihadist networks, they have integrated a lot of their operations, and senior leaders from these jihadist groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taybah, Harqad-e-Muza-Din, Hujee, Jaysh Muhammad, a whole slew of alphabet-soup-of-Pakistani groups have given leadership. Two senior Al-Qaeda leaders killed this year, both were Pakistanis, were top-level leaders. Bin Laden mentions one of them in the documents. He describes them as the commander of one of several Al-Qaeda companies that were operating in Pakistan. This commander, Bader Mansour, was later named the head of Al-Qaeda's operations in Northwestern Pakistan. He's a name that nobody knew until he was dead. And this is a point that Peter Bergen makes in his book as well. You also see Bin Laden's documents, the discussions with the movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, or the TTP. They're talking about coordinating operation. You also have something called the Shuri-Mukaraba, which is an Al-Qaeda-brokered Taliban alliance between four very powerful Taliban groups, including the Khannis, including the movement of Taliban in Pakistan. And their goal is to sort of coordinate their operations in Northwestern Pakistan, as well as conduct attacks inside of Afghanistan. They want to pool the resources, stop the infighting from these groups. This is something Al-Qaeda has always strived. This is one of its main goals. This is what the base is all about, to facilitate these other jihadist groups, local, regional, global jihadist groups, and get them operating in conjunction to operate in a single goal to establish their Islamic state in Caliphate. Al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan. Again, you could believe me, or you could look at ISAS press releases on raids against Al-Qaeda. I document these. Since the end of May, Special Operations Forces conducted 21 raids against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. That's just Al-Qaeda, not Islamic movement in Pakistan or other allied groups. 21 raids since May. They've taken place in 12 different districts in seven of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. They're not just confined to Qunar and Noristan. They have a presence throughout Afghanistan. When you look at the press releases back to 2007, you see that Al-Qaeda and all of its affiliates have been targeted in 114 of the more than 400 districts in Afghanistan, in 25 of 34 provinces. Does that sound to you like a group that has been defeated in Afghanistan? 57 raids against these allied terrorist groups in Afghanistan so far this year. Again, does that sound like a group that has been beaten off the battlefield? This is the pace of these raids year after year, after year. That's because they're pervasive. They have a network that is well-established there, and they're replacing and replenishing their leaders. In Qunar problems, The New York Times released a report earlier this year that leaked an ISAF report on Al-Qaeda havens. It described Qunar and Noristan as Al-Qaeda safe havens. We've killed seven senior Al-Qaeda leaders and two last-guarried-type leaders in one district in Qunar province alone so far this year. Al-Qaeda still has a close work in relationship with the Afghan Taliban groups. Mullah Dadaullah Front. He was a Gitmo detainee. This is the Taliban group that conducted a raid on Camp Bastion and destroyed a Marine Harrier Squadron just a couple of weeks ago. Does that again sound like a group that's defeated? The Al-Qaeda network designations are clear, every Keqani network leader that's been designated has been designated with links, close ties to Al-Qaeda. We're leaving Afghanistan and we have no coherent policy in Pakistan. So as we're drawing down, Al-Qaeda is going to increase its ties with these local groups. And it's going, again, Al-Qaeda still has a safe haven in northwestern Pakistan and beyond. They still have a safe haven in Afghanistan and it's only gonna get worse as we decide to leave. Thank you very much. Now, I'm gonna let these gentlemen go at each other but I'm gonna pose a few questions to them first. And after we have this stage, I will take questions from the audience and then we will have closing statements again from all of these folks up here. And then you will vote again. Now, first question I'll put to the affirmative. I mean, could you help me define, I mean, let's say you have an Al-Qaeda affiliated group and let's say the definition of affiliation is that it gives a ba'a, some form of allegiance to Zawahiri. When does that group in your mind become resilient and resurgent? Is it only when it strikes inside of the United States if it were to blow up an embassy? Would that constitute a resurgence? If it would blow up two embassies, would it constitute a resurgence or must it take down a capital ship and two skyscrapers? What is, what in your own mind would mean to you that Al-Qaeda is back? Your question is a powerful one and I'd like to take it on from the perspective of what does one compare it with, right? If, as my partner and I argue, that jihadism and Salafi jihadism is an extreme and very minority variant of an understanding of how one politically organizes through violent overthrow and return to the elders. If one agrees that that has been around for a long time, and my partner and I do, and one looks and takes a benchmark of the 1990s and asks the very same question you just asked, okay? The attacks and activities in places like Algeria, in places like Egypt, which included attacks against American and Western consulates, tour groups, ideologues in Pakistan in the 1990s where our consulates were frequent targets of groups affiliated with the Salafi jihadi ideology, all those existed in a past life. Prior to Al-Qaeda as a base organization, describing what I clearly disagree with Tom Jocelyn on, which is some notion that they've always been focused on these local activities, as I presented to you in my affirmative, of the five major things that defined Al-Qaeda and the bin Laden-then-Zawahiri-appended organization. It was the coalescence around the idea of attack the far enemy first, to drive out the Westerners, to make it soft ground for the near enemy to be struck. And it was reluctance on the part of Zawahiri in the period from 1993 through at least 1997, when he was running his own Islamic jihad campaign through EIJ in Egypt to want to do that. And so I take issue with this claim that we are different somehow when we have these activities going on now than we were in the 1990s, simply because we wanna give credit to an organization that claimed to be a core, that claimed to be about driving out Western presence, and as Peter has said, failed miserably, that claims to be an organizing and cohesive force. And we see it acting now in ways that are very similar to the way it acted between 1992 and 1999. And we wanna say that Al-Qaeda as this mythical organizational structure, and here's where I get into this, is it a network or is it an organization? If you are gonna focus on something that's significantly different, you have to focus on Al-Qaeda, the organization, the base. It's ex-post analysis for us to now accredit Al-Qaeda with this diverse, networking type of structure. Indeed, that's always existed. There's always been a Salafi-Jahadi network since at least the time of the Egyptian Salafi activities, which, by the way, were those that underpinned and underwrote the strike against Sadat in 1981 that Zawahiri was inimically about. So I think what we have here to your question is, because they're striking in Libya, because they're striking in other places right now, does that mean they're still Al-Qaeda affiliate? And just because they claim or say that they're associated with this wider brand name, a brand name I might add that we know from Bin Laden's own documents, he was discouraging would-be affiliates from referring themselves to because of the diminution of the cache of the name, I think we have something fundamentally different. And we know that Bin Laden in 2010 was attempting to send messages to find new names for the organization, the base, because it had lost such cache in the Muslim world. And so it's in that space, Raul and our opponents here in this debate, that I suggest we take a different look, a more critical look and not give credence to the propaganda that Al-Qaeda still exists as a core, as a fundamental organization. And instead, go through the mirrored windows and lenses and saying that this is a network and it's somehow different than maybe it was before. It's returning to what it was before in many ways, shapes and forms. And it's important that we understand that and not give credence to an organizational thread that has got very little practical manifestation on the ground. If I could take from that, then it is conceivable that Islamic jihadism could be alive and well but Al-Qaeda could be kaput. Absolutely, okay? And that requires us to take a different vocabulary and a different approach to understanding how we tackle these problems. Not with masses of military formations and activities overseas, but rather with the interconnected intelligence, activities and involvement. And I think we're seeing that start to shape and build as a frame of approach from our administration or government right now in places like Yemen and Somalia that Peter already mentioned. Now, all right, let me pose a question over to the negative. Would you disagree with their contention that the Al-Qaeda mojo isn't doing so well in the Middle East? That the Great Arab Revolt has taken some juice out of the cause and that you do not find the youth in, certainly in Arab lands, to be as susceptible to Al-Qaeda's call as it once was. Or do you think that's not true at all? I wouldn't say it's not true at all. I'd say it's a mixed bag and it's far more complicated than Tom is saying. And I'll give you an example. I mean, here's what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on September 26th. Here's what she talked about in Northern Africa. This is exactly how she put it. She was talking about Al-Qaeda and Islamic Maghreb. She goes, this is a threat to the entire region and to the world and most particularly to the people in the region themselves who deserve better. They deserve better from their leaders and they deserve better from the international community. She goes on to talk about how they now have a larger safe haven, increased freedom to maneuver, terrorists are seeking to extend their reach and their networks, I know you don't like the word networks but she used the word networks as the denial of commissioners, used their networks in multiple directions and they are working with other violent extremists to undermine the democratic transitions that are underway in North Africa as we tragically saw in Benghazi. That's the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, okay? So you wanna go through- You're not a little uncomfortable using Hillary Clinton as an expert on terrorism. Actually, I think Hillary has, she's had a mixed bag on this stuff but she's been better than most I would say in terms of government. But just look at CNN. You wanna talk about the youth for your CNN on October 4th, talking about what's going on in Syria. Poor Al-Qaeda group steps up suicide bombings in Syria. It's October 4th, just this month. You talk about August, Al-Qaeda and Libya, okay? Report put out by the Library of Congress in the Pentagon. Talks about Al-Qaeda's plans and their growth in eastern Libya. Something I warned about in congressional testimony in 2011 and actually said, we have to support the many good Muslims in Libya, the National Transitional Council and all the people that wanna be free in Libya to counter this threat. You talk about New York Times was talking about the jihadists are actually getting the principal recipient now of arms in Syria just a couple days ago, just a day ago. And that when they highlight that, they're worried about what Al-Qaeda's doing there as they have Obama administration officials. This is the Associated Press, Al-Qaeda making comeback in Iraq officials say. This is just earlier this month. So yeah, okay, in some ways Al-Qaeda's brand has been hurt. Absolutely, it's something I've talked about before. The reason is because the Al-Qaeda brand has caused more Muslim casualties around the world than has ever caused in the Western world, okay? That's the truth of the matter. And so there is this, the seed of the strategic destruction is in their own terrorism. If we play it right and if we work with our allies around the world and remain vigilant. But if we can't just blasé, say, you know, it's over and let's not worry about it. Can I say one thing about what Peter and Tom are saying in response real quick? You can, I'll respond. You know, they talk about the bureaucracy. Or Peter states a lot of statistics on bureaucracy.  That's not what the debate is about. No, no, but wait a minute. If you're saying that we're much safer today, which I believe we are, I mean they do a good job of shutting down plots, right? But if the debate today is Al-Qaeda defeated, your position is Al-Qaeda's defeated, right? Well, then we don't need the Department of Homeland Security. They did say that Islamic jihadism could be alive and well, but Al-Qaeda does dead. Okay, good point. But still the Department of Homeland Security. I just want to respond to some of the documents that Tom just produced. Al-Qaeda and Islamic Maghreb is doing pretty well in parts of North Africa. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is maybe doing slightly better than it used to, having suffered a massive defeat in 2007. In Iraq, the jihadists in Syria, we don't really know exactly what percentage of the opposition they are, but let's say they're doing reasonably okay. What do these things all have in common? That they don't threaten the West directly in any shape or form. These groups are not successful in taking over, they're not gonna take over the country in any of these cases. They are extremely unlikely to produce training camps, churning out thousands of recruits as the pre-911 Afghanistan did with Al-Qaeda. And they're all causes for concern, but they don't get back to the central issue is, Al-Qaeda, the central organization capable of launching major attacks on the United States is basically done. I mean, do you disagree with that? Al-Qaeda central launching a terrorist attack against the United States. I would say that's a very specific way of saying it. I say there is a terrorist network. That's kind of what we're talking about. No, no, no, no, no, no, because no, because it has to do with can Al-Qaeda central reach out through its affiliates to attack us? Okay, but then. And there's a clear pattern where according to the National Counterterrorism Center, according to the Obama administration, that's exactly what they're trying to do. So, what's that? Try. True, but don't succeed it. But trying doesn't mean that the threat's gone.  That bomb was off over Detroit in 2009. Do we have this discussion? If that, if Abu-Tubmah Talib's trigger works in Times Square in May, 2010, are we having this discussion? The point is, it didn't. So we have structures in place. So you're going to like that. They're doing quite good. And we're not talking about eliminating all those. We're talking about not empowering and enabling a mythology which really is not tethered to these strikes in local areas. That's been going on for a long time. But this isn't a mythology. But the ability to strike here and our ability to neuter that and our ability now to work with the government of Yemen, which by the way, its new president has come and said we are working in partnering. As openly said, we're working with drones, which is kudos. In Somalia, we're working with them. In the transitional authority in Libya now where we've seen the migration, admittedly, of some Salafi jihadists that were under perhaps the thumb of the Qaddafi regime and indeed, LIFG had pledged a truce, if you recall with Qaddafi. They appear now according to our own reports from NCTC and others to have migrated a bit to Mali and we're working with partners on that. And clearly, if I were Hillary Clinton, I'd be putting out stuff as well, talking about this threat. Notice, she doesn't refer to the threat, Tom, directly as al-Qaeda. You ascribe that to it. She talks it as about these, the al-Qaeda's law of regret, okay? That's a name, that's a name, which is... One of the things. That's a name which is a consolidated front for the former Algerian Salafi jihadist movement and the former LIFG, Libyan group, okay? Which we knew as those elements with regional aspirations long before al-Qaeda's international organization. So again, as I put in my affirmative speech, if we're gonna now accredit al-Qaeda with the leadership of something that existed in the 1990s, then we are, one, empowering their own rhetoric. Two, we're making something larger that it needs to be right now. And three, we're misunderstanding the degree to which we should be working with partners, as we are, and starting to work more with a less military hammer and a more strategically applied intelligence, police cooperation, diplomatic arrangement, which will include technological and special forces solutions as we're pursuing right now. Could I, is there a nuance here? I mean, you can say that Western counter-terrorism has improved enormously since 9-11. And I don't think anybody here would disagree with that. I know a gentleman in Great Britain who's an MI5 and he works exhaustively day after day with running about 1,000 counter-surveillance operations, surveillance operations of Islamic militants in the country. Now, he would not say that the Islamic militant threat is defeated. He would say that we just checked it. The DST, which I think is the finest counter-terrorist service in the Western world, would say we are checking the counter-terrorist threat, but we haven't defeated it. It's still quite vibrant because we're running operations everywhere across the country. We haven't felt the need to pull back those operations because we keep seeing them trying to do something nefarious. So is there a difference here between the effectiveness of Western counter-terrorism and then deducing that the opponent is defeated as opposed to he's just for the time he's checkmated. He may later be defeated, but right now, based on the operations being run, he's far from defeated. You know, we're gonna kind of get into semantics, but I mean, since you raised London where I grew up, let me sort of sketch out, I think, what has happened to Al Qaeda in Britain, which was, the Western country's most threatened by Al Qaeda was clearly the United Kingdom because of its historic connections to Pakistan. Well, after the 7-7 attack and then the failed 2006 planes plot, I mean, we have seen the British government produce a lot of cases and these cases take a long time to come to trial in Britain, and once these cases have gone through the legal system, it has become clear to the British Muslim population that the threat from these groups was real. They've turned against them rather dramatically. They booted out Abu Hamza, who's just arrived in this country, who was one of the principal clerics. They've exported Hala Dal Fawaz, who was, in fact, the guy who I went to see to meet bin Laden. He's just arrived in this country. Their kind of approach, I think, up to the 7-7 bombing was based on a long-term British approach to dissent, which Karl Marx has buried in Highgate Cemetery. Basically, they allowed people to sort of thrive, who shouldn't have been allowed to thrive, and that's changed. I think that they have, the threat from Al Qaeda in Britain I think has receded very, very dramatically, and we haven't seen anything like, since 2006, that's really the last significant plot that we've seen coming out of the British Isles that threaten the United States and threaten Britain. So I would say Al Qaeda is essentially defeated in Britain, in addition to being defeated as far as we're concerned here in the United States. Now, I mean, I spent a fair amount of time with European security and domestic intelligence officers, and one does get the impression from them, though the threat is, in their minds, still very much there, whether it be from Al Qaeda or from other Islamic militants, I do certainly also get the impression that the potential for terrorism coming out of the European Muslim community, which not all that long ago, I think many folks would have thought might have been the greatest danger. These folks had, for a variety of reasons, the character, the composite that could have made them quite, quite dangerous. We haven't seen that threat actually develop as much as one might have expected in 2000, 2001. So, I mean, does Peter have a point there that the philosophical appeal and allure of Al Qaeda and other Islamic jihadist groups really hasn't developed as much as it should have, certainly in the West? Yeah, I mean, I'd say a couple of things about this. I think a lot of what Peter said is right. I agree with a lot of what you said there about the UK and everything. You can't say that.  We're just wrong. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, you know, I mean, part of this goes to the heart of the whole idea of Muslims living in the West, and part of the, I'm very skeptical of the idea of a lot of the rhetoric that's come out from certain quarters in this country about the Muslim threat in the West, because when you look at it, you don't see the idea that they're adopting Al Qaeda's ideology wholesale or that, I mean, you just know too many millions of Muslims living in the West who have nothing to do with any of this. And the idea that you're gonna sort of lump them into this whole idea, this whole issue, I think, you know, I agree with what Peter's saying. You gotta be very careful not to do that, and it's absolutely right. I'll say this though. It's not that the ideology is, it doesn't have any appeal to those Muslims in the West. I'd say it's a very small minority. And what you see is you see them mainly go off to other battlefields. You see them go off to Somalia, for example. You've written about a lot of the Western recruits as of high in Somalia. You see that you're including out of Minnesota and the Midwest. Again, when you talk about those recruits, most of the Somali community in Minnesota has nothing to do with this. And actually those families are victimized by this recruiting practices just as much as anybody else. But you see in the West, you see them going off to, you know, Northern Pakistan previously were training to allow those drone strikes that we talk about. We're targeting, you know, these German Al Qaeda cells, others who come from the West that come to train.  Overall, however, so there is an issue there, okay? Overall, however, I think that is the right point that basically this is not some giant fifth column that you have to worry about in the Western world of, you know, people adopting this ideology. Can I, you know, I mean, I think Gruel makes a very good point. I mean, this whole question of European Muslims and the lack of terrorist activity is a huge dog that didn't bark.  They have higher incomes and they don't live in ghettos. Well, reverse every statement and you get what it's like to be a European Muslim. European Muslims have a real reason to be angry, yet this is not really produced very much terrorism at all. And the last, of course, the last attack was the 777 attack in London. But I'll tell you another dog that didn't bark. And if we'd had this discussion in 2003, the main subject of discussion would be an Al Qaeda affiliate called Jamais Lamea, which was responsible for the Bali attacks of 2002 that killed 200 mostly Western tourists. Jamais Lamea is basically out of business. After all, this is an affiliate within the world's largest Muslim country. And it's out of business because these groups always do the same thing.  And it's out of business because of the actions of the Indonesian government, the American government, the Australian government. And it's just defunct. And, you know, am I wrong in this point? It's taken a heavy toll. I wouldn't say it's totally defunct. No, I'm not looking at argue with you.  They've put the hardcore terrorists, but the Madrasas still exist, that crank them out, that crank out their radicals. By the way, the people, the important people that involved in that group are still out there. On the issue of Madrasas, distance has been raised.  And they don't, you can't get past JFK. Secure, you know. Or they've been so pithed by studying Islamic law for so long that they're just, they're paralyzed. Anyway, the idea that sort of Madrasas are a big problem that Jihadi terrorism, I think, has sort of been overdrawn. And it's a problem for locally though. This is a big recruiting base for most of the local. Right, okay. But so, in terms of Al-Qaeda central, it's a non-issue. I mean, bin Laden- But you know, that's if you agree that Al-Qaeda central isn't interested in conducting attacks on the near enemy, which I contend that it is, it has always been a part of Al-Qaeda. I mean, I think what you're talking about is just that, it's not that Al-Qaeda is defeated, it's just that they've shifted their strategy back a little closer to going after the near enemy. Because they can't do what they really want to do, which is attack us. But that doesn't mean in the future they won't be able to. If you justify those threats as the attacks here in the United States. Bill, I think it's important though to go back to the origin. Al-Qaeda, the base, the definition, the description, the development of it is 96, 97. And it's appending on this notion that we must strike the far enemy first, the decisive blow. Then we can turn and have success against the near enemy. It's because the near enemy thesis was dominant in groups from Algeria to Egypt to Indonesia to the Philippines prior to that time. And so when you look at the uniqueness, the capability and the stricture, as Peter and I have said that made Al-Qaeda what it was and that made it something that was worth the mobilization to the extent that we have seen the mobilization in the Western world, it was in fact that capacity. And I'm sorry, but five failed attempts by fringe elements, none of which really had the same type of cohesive training and bomb making expertise shown that was developed under Al-Qaeda's tutelage in the 90s and the early 2000s. That does not make a metastasized global threat. It instead produces something that's a lot more localized, a lot more regional. And no, we don't disestablish structures. We're a lot more scrupulous I think than going forward though, and not imparting to Al-Qaeda that which it would have, which is its propaganda and claiming responsibility for things as diffuse as Mali or things going on in the Philippines. And instead treat it as the local type of events and the grievances that underwrite and underscore a lot of these local type of events. That's I think the point that we're making here is that's where the focus needs to be. Not somehow ascribing to Al-Qaeda a network structure that indeed existed prior to Al-Qaeda of Bin Laden and Zawahiri and is gonna exist for a long time into the future. So are you saying that if you had an affiliated Al-Qaeda group in the United States, and again the definition of affiliated is they give bail.  Or I grant you something that would be traceable back, say to the western part of Pakistan where you've actually seen the power. Do you need something more than the bayah? Yeah, I would say so, yes. Because again, bayah, in my experience of it, living in places in the Gulf and then also in South Asia, okay? A bayah's war can be a religious affiliation that can also have a propaganda motivation, can also have a tie and a tether back to mosques in different parts of the world. Especially those from South Asia tied back to the richer ones in the Gulf states that in essence is marketing and fundraising. But doesn't say that you're aligned with the philosophy that we must strike against the west as our principle and main focus. Would you agree with that? No, I don't agree that that's the principle main focus of Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda in the 1990s fought alongside with the Taliban via Brigade 055, that was a primary function of Al-Qaeda and then what it took was called recruits that came from the craning camps to conduct a cax against the west. It's indisputable. So I just completely disagree with the notion that Al-Qaeda, as established, is primarily devoted to... Well this is a little, because I think we need to disagree then because as I mentioned, of the five big things that made Al-Qaeda what it was, three of those are gone. And I don't disagree with Bill that there still is this infusion of local and regional conflicts, whether they be Bosnia or Algeria or other places, with an attempt at ecumen. But it is no longer what it was in terms of the western focus. If Al-Qaeda, those two bantermen, detonates that bomb, instead of tries it in his seat. Which was sophisticated, but as I'm contrary to what you were saying by the way, it's an underwear bomb. See, I will tell you. Again, then there's a successful... Certainly, we know there's a bomb maker in Yemen who is pretty accomplished. Well, I think we're tracking one primarily right now, but you might be able to... And what we've heard in the Ravenpilots said is, they laughed at that and said, what do you think? He's not training people as he's going? Yeah, by the same token, they didn't give him enough training to make sure he'd get it done the first time. And therefore he's analogous to Richard Reid, in 2002, flying in from London, who also couldn't set his shoes off. This is far different from the trained hardcore assassins that boarded the planes on 9-11 and knew exactly what they're doing had been rehearsed. We know we can trace back rehearsals that went back to times, planes between Japan and the Philippines in the mid-1990s. That's a far different thing. And folks, I would contend to you that that's what tells you more about what the success is gonna be of an Al-Qaeda that's a global threat. Not the things going on locally or internationally, which we don't need to ignore far from it, but we do need to understand that it is not the same kind of metastasized, catastrophic threat that for too long has dominated our vocabulary. Okay, I'm gonna halt the exchange back and forth here just briefly and throw it out to the audience for questions. Be sure to stick your hand up near clearly so I can see it. Be sure that you ask a question and please identify yourself. And to sort of wait for the mic, which I think is... The mic is coming. It's just coming. Unless you have a really big voice. Mike, here. I'm gonna give preferential treatment to Cliff Mayer. Which is your boss. My boss. So that's our boss. Cliff May Foundation. Let me, the question is very simple one. I'm gonna just give two lines of context afterwards. And the question is, what's that? Cliff May, I'm the president of the Foundation for Defensive Democracies.  My question is, is it on the rise or is it in retreat? Because I think that's an important thing to understand here. And I think it's particularly important. And here's the context. Because when you say, as you have it in this forum or at the Aspen National Security Forum, that al-Qaeda is dead, it tends to play into the mean that the tide of war is receding. And give a certain complacency because if al-Qaeda is defeated, then perhaps we have very little to worry about. And one of the reasons, and this is an important point, that people have come to that conclusion is, you all have here talked about jihadist terrorism and the jihadi ideology. And I commend you for that. Very few American or European leaders will use those terms. They avoid those terms for reasons we could discuss and probably won't have time for. Because they don't discuss that, the belief is that al-Qaeda is the only threat. If al-Qaeda is only defeated, we have no more threat. And that also brings me to one last thing that has not been mentioned and should be, which is the jihadist terrorism we're talking about with al-Qaeda is Sunni jihadism. But there's also Shia jihadism. Iran is a jihadi state. We are disconnecting the dots between the most important sponsor of terrorism in the world, the one jihadi state, Iran. And then people think also, al-Qaeda is defeated, Iran's a different problem, it's probably just Israel's problem, and we don't have any problems in the world. And we are therefore miscommunicating and misinforming the broader public. Thank you, Cliff. I think I detect a question in there. And I will answer in the following way. You know, I completed my first book about al-Qaeda 10 days before 9-11. That's how I met Raul in Yemen. And I actually wrote a very lengthy letter to John Burns of the New York Times, which I forgot about as a result of 9-11 and found six months later, basically laying out in a letter over four pages, why I thought that an attack on the American interests was sort of imminent in the summer of 2001. John wrote a story in the New York Times, which because of an editing dispute based on kind of the information I was giving him, which didn't make it into the paper on Sunday, September 9th, 2001, which was basically saying, you know, that there is this bin Laden is warning about a big attack coming. So I don't think I need to be lectured in any shape or form about whether or not I take the threat seriously. And I think my whole life has been, professional life has been diverted to analyzing this. And as I sort of talked about in my opening remarks, I just think it's a fact that al Qaeda is essentially dead. I mean, I think I'm an objective observer of this and have spent a long time thinking about it, dead in the terms of its ability to do anything close to 9-11. And as Tom has talked about at some length, I mean, we're not claiming that jihadi terrorism is over, nor are we claiming by the way that ordinary crime is over.  The question is one of scale and magnitude. And, you know, at this point, the idea that al Qaeda or an affiliated group can launch an attack that would essentially change our national security, the way that we organize our national security, that time is over. If I could just add on to that. I think, Cliff, that your question and your concern strikes me as a legitimate one, but one I would offer this comment to. That is, I think our audience has grown in sophistication over the last decade. And I think even our counter-terrorism leadership in this country is figuring that out, because if you go look at the July 2011 released counter-terrorism strategy, you'll see a lot of discussion and reference in there to resilience. And there, and I think that is a leading edge, which I personally think that people of both political affiliations are leaning towards, which is that you're never gonna drive the terrorist threat to zero, never. You can expend funds and activities to guard against the worst and the most difficult possible risk. And that's where I think Peter and I agree that we have done a lot of that to now and we need to be smart in retaining most of it, but we need to also be critical about what we can and cannot retain. And we do understand the difference between a Sunni and a Shia threat and the way in which state sponsorship works there. I also take encouragement from the fact of my time spent in the Middle East and in South Asia. And when you have al-Qaeda discussed in terms of it's being defeated, it's defeated in the minds of the most important element that's out there long-term. And that's in the minds of the youth of the Arab world. Al-Qaeda is seen as either passe or an egregious offense when you discuss it in places like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or other places about its role in terms of now and the future. Because of the orgiastic violence it's become associated with and because of the fact it's not seen as a solution. Therefore, local groups often try to disassociate themselves from the al-Qaeda name and the frame of reference. And here is why I say understanding that should give us an ability to also be nuanced and sophisticated and understanding the threat that still exists, representing it appropriately and dealing with it properly. All right, I'll go. Have you seen a lamb? Sure. From the Sunday Times who has done some of the best reporting on this issue. Hi, I thought that was fascinating. A couple of things I wanted to ask. The first thing I want to ask you is whether you think that we in the media but also government officials actually made al-Qaeda more of a threat than it actually was by attributing all sorts of things to it that perhaps it wasn't behind just as in the same way in Afghanistan things always tend to be blamed on the Taliban when often they're actually tribal attacks and feuds. The other question that I wanted to ask you, I mean, I would take issue with what Tom just said about al-Qaeda being per se in Pakistan. I've spent an awful lot of time there. I've been there several times recently but I've been going there 25 years. And it seems to me that al-Qaeda is very much still a recruiting tool among Madrasa in Pakistan, of course, combined with the drone attacks and one attack that you didn't mention when you talked about all the failed attacks in recent years was the Mumbai massacre. More than 200 people were killed. Now, that was Lashkai Toyba but there are a lot of links with al-Qaeda and, of course, they get expertise from al-Qaeda even if they're not directly organized by them. But does the gentleman want to? No, I absolutely agree. Pakistan, you know, to say that the Pakistanis have denounced al-Qaeda or denounced these terror groups, TTP. Their own government and military won't move against the movement of the Taliban in Pakistan in the tribal areas despite horrific attacks, not just against civilians but against the military and government institutions. It's because that they feel that these groups are popular and they feel that it's against their interests, the interests of the state. When Cliff says that it runs the primary sponsor of state terrorism, the only place I might disagree is that Pakistan, to me, is the primary state sponsor of terrorism in that it either shelters these groups or does nothing to take them on. So when you have that infrastructure that exists in Pakistan, in Iran, and in other countries, it's hard for me to say that al-Qaeda and its allies have been defeated. Christine, if I could jump in there, though. I mean, with all due respect, I think one again has to discriminate in Pakistan about how Pakistanis feel about al-Qaeda specific versus the general frame of reference, which is a Muslim country under siege, misappreciated, and done wrong by Westerners or Brahmins from India or the others. And I haven't been there in Pakistan for a little over a year, but I try to watch carefully what the press reports. And indeed, there is this antithopy and this hostility, but it plays out, I would argue to you, much more through local groups, the Abhande groups, groups that recruit for HUJI, that recruit for Lashgiri Janvi, well, even though it's banned officially, Lashgiri Taiba, even though it's also banned, okay? And so there's this general frame of reference. One of my research colleagues refers to it as a Petri dish in Pakistan. But when one talks about Mumbai, one also has to talk about where the acumen and the affinity for conducting that strike and attack came from. And we are not clear certain, but we do know from the Indian court trials that they believe most of it came from low-level operatives associated with Pakistani intelligence services, not from some type of al-Qaeda direct link or networked, okay? So I think that's an important distinction. And therefore, I think I can agree with Bill on some of his point, but also wanna frame it a little differently than you have framed it in not seeing that there's an affinity for al-Qaeda in Pakistan. The polling there says that al-Qaeda is not seen as popular, okay? But these other anti-Western types of Muslim groups, are seen as very popular. Just a quick thing on the Mumbai strikes. You know, it's not exactly clear how much involvement of senior level al-Qaeda guys are involved there. I mean, one of the things that Bruce Riedel, a former Obama administration advisor, President Obama's advisor is totally in the impress is that based on his briefings on Bin Laden's documents capture in Abad, there's evidence that in fact, Bin Laden was not only in touch with senior Lashkari Taiba leaders right up until his demise, but also may have seen surveillance reports used in the Lashkari Taiba attack on Mumbai. That's according to Bruce Riedel. It didn't come from me, it's from Bruce Riedel, former Obama administration advisor. I would say those documents, and basically much of what's in the cash, and this is why I'd ask the press to fight for, is those documents should be see the live day. If that is what Bruce Riedel says, then that tells a very different story about what's going on in multiple levels. Never let the government hide documents. Right there in the blue shirt, blue tie. Shulma, okay. Hi, my name is Yago Kozolowski. I'm from the Washington Quarterly. Allow me to apologize myself. I'm not American citizen, so English is not my native language. I'll try to make myself clear. My question is directed towards the side defending the fact that al-Qaeda is defeated. You said that the main purpose of al-Qaeda and the main strategy was first making a foreign decisive blow, and afterwards orientating the focus more towards closer attacks in the region. The other side said that the main goal was focusing on the closer attacks in the region no matter what. Even if I go along in the thought that the side defending that al-Qaeda is defeated said, first make a decisive blow abroad and then closer attacks in the region. Even if I go along in that, what if the timeframe is different and we are currently in the second phase and we are currently witnessing closer attacks in the region and we are currently witnessing al-Qaeda getting a stronger local base in order to have even more decisive foreign blow than 9-11 was? What if the timeframe is different? Do you think that's possible that al-Qaeda is just trying to strengthen itself more in order to have an even bigger attack? I'm not saying within the next five years, maybe even 50 years, even a more decisive blow than 9-11 was.  And this is actually one of these, it's a non-fault, to use a kind of technical term, it's a non-falsifiable proposition because the evidence for the proposition is the fact that we haven't been attacked is merely evidence that they're planning something even bigger. This doesn't make any sense. You know, as Yogi Berra famously said, it's hard to make predictions particularly about the future. But I think when you look at the actual evidence, the, you know, they continue to try and attack us even low level attacks and they just haven't succeeded which suggests that they are, you know, not able to do anything of any real significance. It's not like they are waiting to do something bigger than 9-11. After all, they trained, you know, Najib al-Zazi to go and attack and if he succeeded he would have killed a few dozen people in Manhattan. So they're prepared, they're trying to get anything through and even with these small-bore attacks, they're not succeeding. Najib al-Zazi, as you recall, drove from Denver to Manhattan in 2009 around the September 11th anniversary and he failed. You know, on that point, I think we were looking at this often from our perspective but what about from Al Qaeda's perspective? And I can only guess, I'll go try and red team this here. By the way, we have a very good answer to that question with the documents released in Abtabad and you know as well as I do, Bill, because you've read them. It's an account. Only 17 documents. Okay, bin Laden's own account. That were hand selected to support a view. Yeah, exactly. Bin Laden's account of what was going on in Al Qaeda was pretty grim based on that. According to 17 selected documents, one that was seriously redacted. Look at this from Al Qaeda. Thousands upon thousands have been translated. No, again, the press that's here should be calling for all these to be released to the public, so we can do our own analysis. But go ahead. From Al Qaeda's perspective, we've left Iraq and look at how that's gone. We're leaving Afghanistan. Al Qaeda really worked really well for them in Iraq, right? Well, look at them today. The attacks have doubled. Their network's extended. They're extending attacks into Syria by supporting Neil Neuser front. They suffered, Bill, as you well know, and you were there, a strategic defeat in Iraq. They absolutely were defeated in 2008 but this is 2012, where we've disengaged where Sunni tribal leaders have said where is America? We haven't, after we withdrew, we left. We left an important group of people that had provided us intelligence, not just in Iraq, but throughout the Middle East. You know the way the tribe spread across borders. We've abandoned this. The Iraqis, Al Qaeda in Iraq sees this. Al Qaeda sees this. Again, I'm red teaming it from their perspective. They're looking at us disengaging from the Middle East. When was the last time Al Qaeda in Iraq did an out of country operation? Al Qaeda in Iraq did an out of country operation? Yeah. Yesterday in Syria. All the time in Syria. Yeah. But not only that, but Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who leads Al Qaeda in Iraq, has threatened us in the summer of this year. He openly threatened us. Now, is he actually concentrating on attacking us right now? No, he's planning all sorts of other operations. In fact, Al Qaeda in Iraq's attack tempo has gone from, according to Pentagon and according to reporting by CNN and elsewhere, has gone from 75 attacks per week earlier this year to over 140 a week now. That's the jump that's happened just this year in Al Qaeda in Iraq. So yes, they were discredited. They had suffered monumental blows in Iraq. But guess what? Things are not static, okay? These aren't still pictures. This is a continuum and you have to follow these threats as they move through time. And as what we see right now, according to bomb administration itself says that it cannot arm the Syrian rebels because it's too worried about Al Qaeda in Iraq's presence amongst the Syrian rebels. That's not me saying it. That's top, this is Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's top of bomb administration officials. They're saying this is a threat. That also might be an excuse. Peter, I'm going to look at the point. Let me take another question here. Sean Waterman. Sean Waterman. Yes, Sean Waterman from the Washington Times. I'd like to ask both sides of the debate to enlarge on a point that was touched on briefly, which is the impact of the revolts in the Arab world and the toppling of the secular dictatorships. Obviously, the intelligence services in Egypt were huge allies of the United States. There were most renditions were to Egypt. Jordan, obviously they're still there. But what my question is, what impact has the Arab Spring had in terms of this debate, this variable that we're looking at? And I'd also be interested to know if anyone has any comments on Tom Jocelyn's research, which suggested that al-Qaeda leaders in the Arab world were involved in these protests, these anti-American protests sparked by the video. Our opponents haven't said this directly, but you could take away an implication from some of the things they're saying, which is that basically it was better under Gaddafi and better under Mubarak. It was more stable and less chaotic. These intelligence services were giving us information about the jihadis. No, absolutely not. Okay, good, because then we're all in agreement about the following proposition, which is that the reason that al-Qaeda and groups like it basically came to exist is because of these authoritarian regimes. It's not an accident that so many people in al-Qaeda were from Saudi Arabia or Yemen or Egypt or Libya. And the fact that these regimes have fallen is gonna really take the wind out of these groups over time because there will be more political space for Islamist ideas that aren't necessarily tied to violence. And it's not an accident that Sa'i Qutub and Aiman Al-Zawari became more radicalized and Abu Masab al-Zaqawi and the Jordanian prison. And as these regimes, as these authoritarian regimes fall, al-Qaeda and groups like it are just gonna have less and less appeal over time. And I think the winds of history, whether or not you agree with Tom and myself on this issue, history itself, I think, is in agreement in the sense that the tide is turning against these groups because the kind of conditions that created them are going. Yes, if I could. You know, when I worked with US-Sentcom and then when I lived in Qatar, we had these discussions all the time about, what was the alternative to al-Qaeda in some of these very repressive countries that Peter has talked about? Well, you know, our answer was we wanted to try to encourage more political participation, more voice that didn't rely upon violence or the tumultuous turnover or overthrow of these regimes. Well, to a certain extent, we've got what we've wanted over two administrations from two different parties. That doesn't mean in the short term, though, we're not gonna see turbulence. That doesn't mean in the short term, when you disrupt an old order, there's not space for those wedded to violence to maneuver in. But I, like Peter, believe that we are now in the period of turbulence that's on the way to the alternatives that the youth and the youth bulge of these Muslim countries really do need, which is to see that political participation can give them voice, can turn them into something besides jihadi violence, and can produce results over the long term. And just a really quick thing to add. In Benghazi, immediately after the attack on the consulate, there were thousands of people took to the streets and they attacked the Ansara Sharia organization, which is believed to be behind the attack and burned their facility to the ground. That kind of activity just could not have happened while the authoritarian regimes were in power. So I think that there was actually an anti-jihadi movement, which is now beginning to sort of come to fruition in some of these countries, which simply there was no political space for that previously. And that's where I say that Al-Qaeda, the brand, is in worse shape now, even though you may see it spasming to take advantage of the short terms. Because in the long term, it has now had a competitor develop in each of these different locations that it will not contend with well into the future. I don't think we have any disagreement on this side, do we? No, I just want to say one quick thing. You know, in terms of the Arab Spring and long-term hopes, you know, like Raul's written about this, you've written about this, I think we agree, you know, basically in the long run, you know, you can see that the Arab Spring has a lot of hope for the defeat of these organizations absolutely. The problem is that in the short term, they can exploit, and according to official government documents they have, the security vacuums that are left behind. And you know, human history is not deterministic. You know, it moves on a razor's edge one way or the other. And so that's why I think, and that's why I made the largest point about supporting Muslims throughout the Arab world, the Muslim world and all these Arab Spring countries, because there are tons of allies crying for America to stand with them against these groups. Okay, that's why I said that. That's why it's important, because if you want to help history along, and you want to actually really defeat Al-Qaeda, then we can't say, okay, well it's all over, we can pack our bags and go home today. We have to come up with a real strategy for engaging all these different groups that are basically opposing Al-Qaeda. And I'll say this about Ambassador Stevens, who's really a real hero in all this. I've been studying all the lead cables that came out from his consult there and everything else. The guy is, I mean, to me, he's a hero, he really is. Here's a guy though, I want to say something about it. Here's a guy who understood that Al-Qaeda was a threat in Libya. Okay, there are lead cables that he classified that says that he should, that show that Al-Qaeda is a threat in Libya. And it's growing before Qaddafi fell, which is why we're not better off with Qaddafi. And these lead cables show that. But yet he made a choice, he made a personal choice to stand with all those opposed to Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda is in rebellion and opposed to Qaddafi, because he saw the potential inside Libya. I think that's a real sign of hope in Libya and elsewhere. So we agree on that. I think we have time for maybe one or two more questions then we'll go to closing statements. Right there, the gentleman in the back. Good afternoon, my name is Scott Morgan. I am at the Bloc Confused Eagle. I have a question. I want to change one of the questions that was just previously asked about the authoritarian state. What if Al-Qaeda is just scaling back operations in search of a failing state that they can actually exploit the lack of strong security apparatus to set up another basis of operation, like perhaps what we're seeing in Northern Mali, what they've tried to do in the past and failed in Somalia? Could they be setting up operations like that and trying to plan in the future? And another thing, situation we haven't really heard about, is the support that Al-Qaeda has had in the past for the Chechens in Russia. How would that also focus into this debate as well? Thank you. John? Well, I'll take the part about the Chechnya.  It's shown its resiliency. It still exists. It's greatly weakened, but over time has shown the ability to regenerate and conduct terrorist attacks in Moscow. Tolstoy was fighting the Russians. Tolstoy was fighting the Chechens in 1850. I mean, this is kind of a nationalist movement, basically, which is... A little different than that, Peter. I mean, when you look at the Islamic caucus emirate conducting suicide bombings in subways in Moscow, I don't think Tolstoy is doing that. It's not Al-Qaeda coming back. It's not Al-Qaeda. Okay, well, we'll have to agree to disagree on that. Make another debate. Yeah, that's a whole other debate there. You know, I think it's the perfect example of the resiliency of these groups. It really was majorly set back from about 2005 to 2008. Can I just take moderate as privileged here?  Well, it is possible, however, there have been members of that group, that argument, members of Al-Qaeda. Specific individuals you can point to. That's where the distinction becomes. It's not a generic argument. It's about specific individuals.  However, the German government and the Japanese government did cease attacks on us. That's what victory and what defeat looks like. We're not looking at an organization here that has said, well, we're defeated and we're gonna stop conducting operations. They're still doing it. They may be hurt. They may have suffered strategic setbacks, but they're adapting their operations to continue to achieve their goals. All right, to the gentleman in the back, right there. How are you from Pakistan? Well, adding in this statement, Central Asian Al-Qaeda side. From Pakistani perspective, when I see these stations, those books, Xinjiang, Turkpans and people from elsewhere, I look at Al-Qaeda very differently. And maybe you, it does not look like the way it is in Pakistan, but all these element is together in North-Western. Contributing their resources, contributing their training skill. Could I, I don't mean to rush you here, but could you just give us the question, please? This is a question, actually, that I'm actually questioning that Chechen or Xinjiang or Uzbek flavor are not local. Now they have become Al-Qaeda because a lot of their training is being held in North-Western. Second thing is about Al-Qaeda network and movement. How about if it has been turned in ideology, what we call, that theory I didn't heard about this, in fact, phrase, which has been very common in rest of the world, or at least in my part of the world. It is not selfish anymore. There is a big difference between Salafist and Takfiris. Anyone who can, you know, help me talk. Well, I will only jump in on that. I think you're exactly right. I mean, it's the Takfiri strain of the Salafi that become very violent and very oriented against their fellow Muslims for not being pure and specific enough. And therefore it's not a surprise that the vast majority of those who have suffered and been killed have in fact been fellow Muslims in the campaigns that have been conducted by these jihadi organizations over time. So I can't possibly disagree with you on that. I think you're right. I mean, it's not a word that has much cache, you know, in the English language, but certainly is one that resonates in South Asia and does in the Gulf Muslim states. Let me add, though, about the comment and the question about the different locations, different venues. I mean, Bill and certainly, I think, Tom and support, you know, I have talked about the al-Qaeda affiliates found in Afghanistan and other places. I think we need to be very careful here again to talk specifically about who we are dealing with. When we're talking about the Islamic jihadi union or the IMU who have purpose, objectives, and stated goals to overthrow the regime in Uzbekistan and who have, after having been driven out of their valleys of preferred training in the 1990s, worked and coalesced in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, you have groups and elements that clearly are of the ideology and believe in the violence and the overthrow of the regimes they see as corrupted, insufficiently Muslim, but you don't necessarily have them doing the bidding internationally of al-Qaeda. Now we know IMU and IJU have in fact planned an attempted attacks in Germany. We also know that Pakistan and Pakistan's military and intelligence services have helped us in recent years corral and arrest and detain or kill those who've been involved in those types of activities in places like Qaeda or the Fata area. So I mean, I think you've got an example here where these groups are not of their own nature and face wedded to the great international strike, okay? And when they are, that there's dampeners or constrainers working with counter-terrorist operations and affiliates in Pakistan as well as with the West that bring to bear and arrest these potential plots. All right, we're gonna go to closing statements now. We got two minutes for each individual and then you folks can vote. So I will go to Tom Jocelyn, who just broke his chair. That's about right. So the motion here, put aside everything you just heard for a minute, okay? Motion here is very simple. Is al-Qaeda defeated, okay? The official position of the US government is no, okay? Official position of the State Department, the National Counter-terrorism Center, numerous officials who talk about the threat which they can downplay all they want is that it's not defeated, okay? And most what they can tell you is now that supposedly this has all been localized. These localized threats are now trumping the transnational threats and so therefore we don't really have to worry about it as much anymore, and therefore it's defeated. Well, there's a lot of evidence to the contrary on that. As my colleague, Belroja, was talking about, in pre-911 Afghanistan, al-Qaeda did fight alongside the Taliban. Had fighting units that were recruited. There was one of their main recruiting mechanisms throughout the Muslim Arab world from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, elsewhere was the bring fighters into fight alongside the Taliban against the Northern Alliance. They've had this strategy for being part of the local jihad, the regional interests that they're trying to disconnect the dots on for a long time, okay? Long time. This is not new. And you talk about whether or not these groups pose a threat to the West. I heard Peter say that these groups like in Mali don't necessarily pose a threat to the rest. Well, I'd like to say that according to CNN on October 3rd, a European official was quoted as saying al-Qaeda is spreading and poses a direct threat to us. European officials said, we know the hard way that if al-Qaeda fighters have a free zone, they'll try to attack us all over the place, the official said. We consider AQIM the growing and maybe the leading threat against us. This is a European official. So there are a lot of officials in US government and European governments that disagree with these gentlemen have said, okay? Disagrees with what the official US government says. Disagrees with a lot of history, a lot of facts, okay? And the bottom line at the end of the day is prior to 9-11, al-Qaeda had only killed, according to the 9-11 commissioner report, 50 or less people, okay? If you're gonna go by the number of Americans killed prior to 9-11, you'd say, well, you know, they've only killed 50 or less people. This is why some people slept on the threat. In the meantime, the threat was growing. It was a threat that at that point in time, we did not understand because we weren't doing the connect the dots analysis we need to do. We weren't actually piecing together the picture. We weren't actually going through and figuring out what, how the threat was metastasizing. Again, according to the National Counterterrorism Center, according to State Department, that threat has metastasized and it is a threat. And so what these guys are arguing is complete opposite of what the US government today says. Colonel. Okay, yeah. All right, thank you. And thanks to our noble opponents today who I think have made the best of the case that can be made, but still an insufficient case. And I'd like to argue to you why that is. Specifically, according to US government officials is useful, but I don't think deterministic in how one should think about al-Qaeda. We all know the governmental organizations do their best and their level best, but are risk averse. And so much as Peter was the bellwether of al-Qaeda's risk 12 years ago, I think it's important for us to also serve as a bellwether of putting too many lines and arrows between too many dots that are no longer as connected as they once were. And as a consequence, I stand before you resolved that in the strategic sense, al-Qaeda of bin Laden has been defeated since at least the summer of 2011. Al-Qaeda itself has had much to do with this outcome by pursuing the self-defeating tactics of violence upon more violence across the Muslim world. And that tactic will continue to self-defeat if we don't find a way to oxygenate it beyond the point that it deserves. Orgiastic violence assured the accelerating political isolation of al-Qaeda in the Muslim world during the mid-2000s, which was then accompanied by a successful post-2007 effort by the United States and allied governments that largely has destroyed al-Qaeda central's leadership along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and put asunder its aspirations for now and for foreseeable time in the future to drive the West out of the Islamic world based upon these catastrophic strikes internationally. The May death in 2011 of bin Laden has drawn an end to the stabilizing pattern of hunt and escape that elevated the terrorist leader's reputation and, to a lesser extent, that of Zawahiri into a living legend. And as a result, the reputation of al-Qaeda has suffered proportionally. Indeed, bin Laden's demise has provided the substantial solution to the most critical international security challenges posed by his construct of al-Qaeda and that which we keep referring to unwittingly in a manner that gives more life to this organization than it deserves right now. What's now important is to allow al-Qaeda's obvious defeat and its growing isolation to help form into the alternative those nonviolent Muslim approaches toward political change in the Islamic world, OK, and let those better inform the US framework for counterterrorism policy. And I've mentioned that our counterterrorism policy is now referring to this notion of resilience and we can't guard against all terrorist strikes, but we can work with allies and partners to mitigate those that occur overseas and continue to protect ourselves. That's what I think Peter and I are advocating going forward. And as a consequence, the most effective US counterterrorism approach globally now can be to continue to call attention to al-Qaeda's inherent contradictions and weaknesses, to not conflate individual, regional, and local Salafi jihadist grievances and insurgencies into this larger core. And as much as possible, take no action that might ease al-Qaeda's ability to reclaim its former political, financial, and recruiting support. Because these, in fact, have all dissipated. And its threat, its catastrophic terrorist threat, is, in fact, defeated. Thank you. Bill Rojo. Thank you. And thanks to Peter and Tom's. Definitely was a spirited debate. And I think they've made a good argument, but I still think it falls short. Look, it's not just US officials saying that al-Qaeda is a resilient organization and its threat. I don't know how many of you saw Laura Logan's segment on 60 Minutes the other day, or Bob Woodward wrote the other day as well. This isn't just US officials. This is people that are watching this threat. It's not just Tom and I. I think when we're narrowly defining what defeat means, setbacks, strategic setbacks, even if you want to say that they've happened, and I'd agree in some areas al-Qaeda has suffered some setbacks, especially to leadership. But in other areas, it's cooperated closely with its affiliates. So setback is not a defeat. Al-Qaeda has not ceased its goal to drive the US out of the Middle East and to conduct terrorist attacks.  Al-Qaeda is still fighting locally against the US. It's conducting attacks against US and Afghanistan. There's been raids on US bases where al-Qaeda fighters cooperated with the Taliban, Islamic movement with Uzbekistan. Al-Qaeda has evolved to meet the challenges that it's faced during its last year of war against the United States. If it can't hit us directly, and who's to say they're still not trying? We don't really know that. All we know is that attacks have failed. But they're still attempting to organize at the local levels. And to me, the fact that all of the al-Qaeda affiliates, as well as these newly propping up Salafist groups, are pledging allegiance to al-Qaeda. It tells you that Zawahiri is not an unpopular leader, and the group has no cache, at least within the jihadist movement. Look, how many times did the Bush administration, from 2003 to 2008, declare al-Qaeda dead? By my count, it was around three or four times. He would hold up cards, hold up a scorecard. You're showing dead leaders. Counting dead leaders is not a way to judge how al-Qaeda has been defeated, nor is polling data in the Middle East. You have to look at the organization, its ability to conduct attacks, both locally and globally, and its resiliency. And I think that when you objectively look at all of this, you see that it's an organization that may have suffered some local setbacks or some setbacks to its leadership, but it's still in the game, it's still in the fight, and it intends to be in the fight for decades to come. Thank you very much. And closing for the affirmative, Peter. I'm glad that Bill mentioned al-Qaeda's dead leaders because the best, I think, case or al-Qaeda's defeat is provided by its founder and leader, Osama bin Laden, who in the documents recovered in the Abtabad compound made a number of, I think, very significant points. First of all, he wrote to the Al-Shabaab affiliate in Somalia saying, do not use the word al-Qaeda in your name because you'll find it hard to fundraise and you'll attract a great deal of negative attention. He was quite conscious how the al-Qaeda brand had been diminished. In fact, he noodled with changing the name of the group to some distinctly uncatchy alternatives like the Monotheism and Jihad group and other such new names. So bin Laden himself understood that the al-Qaeda brand was in deep trouble. He told his deputies, don't communicate on the internet, only communicate by mail. That meant that when he was communicating with his deputies, it would sometimes take two or three months for a response to come to one of his queries if it came at all. Not a very efficient way to run an organization. The group was deeply aware of how al-Qaeda in Iraq had really damaged the brand. A lot of the documents talk about how al-Qaeda in Iraq had dealt as a grievous blow to the brand. On the question of drones, which Bill mentioned earlier and he's one of the world's leading experts on this subject, bin Laden wrote a memo saying, I'm leaning to get my brothers out of the Pakistani tribal regions and send them to Afghanistan. He was so conscious of the fact that the drones were decimating his organization. He was advising his 20-year-old son, Hamza, if he was in Raziristan to move to Qatar, which is sort of the Switzerland of the Middle East. It's probably the richest country in the world per capita. So he was still inciting people to holy war but telling his own son to move to one of the safest countries in the world. They set up a counterintelligence shop inside al-Qaeda to try and find the spies who were giving the information that were leading to these successful drone attacks. But they only had a few thousand dollars to fund it. And basically, this counterintelligence shop failed. And in these documents as a discussion, we're running out of money. We need to start kidnapping diplomats in Pakistan, basically, to get ransoms, to refill our coffers. So if this is the supposedly serious threat that we face, I think it's sort of ahistorical to term it as such. I mean, the United States almost was destroyed during the Civil War in the mid-19th century. If the Nazis had won in Europe, Western civilization would have been over. If the Cold War had ended with a bang instead of a whimper, we'd all be dead. No one would be in this room. These were real threats. But the threat that al-Qaeda poses is infinitesimally small compared to these threats. And just to remind you, 17 Americans have died at the hands of jihadi terrorism since 9-11. This is a very small number. And if this is a major threat, as our opponents suggest, I just think that we, Tom and myself, do not find that to be an accurate view of the world. All right. I suggest I please all of you vote, vote honestly. And on behalf of FDD and NAF, I'd like to thank you all for coming and please give a round of applause to the four gentlemen.