In 2004 Abu Musab al Suri, a Syrian jihadist who had known bin Laden since the late 1980s, released on the Internet a history of the jihadist movement in which he described the strategic disaster that had engulfed the Taliban and al Qaeda after 9/11: “America destroyed the Islamic Emirate [of the Taliban] in Afghanistan, which had become the refuge for the mujahideen. …The jihad movement rose to glory in the 1960s, and continued through the ’70s and ’80s, and resulted in the rise of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, but it was destroyed after 9/11.”
Despite the fact that after 9/11 it was obvious to al Qaeda insiders that their organization had taken a terrible beating, Saif al-Adel, one of the group’s military commanders, explained in a 2005 interview that the strikes on New York and Washington were, in fact, a devilishly clever scheme to provoke the United States into making mistakes: “Such strikes will force the person to carry out random acts and provoke him to make serious and sometimes fatal mistakes. …The first reaction was the invasion of Afghanistan.”
There is no evidence, however, that before 9/11 al Qaeda’s leaders made any plans for an American invasion of Afghanistan. They prepared instead only for possible US cruise missile attacks by evacuating their training camps.
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