Quotes from Peter Bergen

In mid-November 2001, as they moved toward the city of Kandahar, the Taliban's de facto capital in southern Afghanistan, Amerine's team called in airstrikes against advancing Taliban units and more or less obliterated a Taliban column of a thousand men that had been dispatched from Kandahar. It was the Taliban's final play to remain in power.

Bin Laden comes out of a business background - he studied public administration and economics at university, and he worked for his family company, which was obviously a rather successful enterprise.

Virulent anti-Semitism is, of course, a staple of militant Islamist ideology.

Mohammed Taheri-Azar, a naturalized U.S. citizen hailing from Iran, crashed his SUV into a crowd at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006, injuring nine people.

During the campaign, Trump in many ways repudiated President Obama's national security and foreign policy approach on issues like the Iran nuclear deal and immigration. So there's a real question of continuity or disruption with Trump, which wouldn't have existed if Clinton was president-elect.

What made al-Awlaki so influential is that, unlike a number of leaders of al Qaeda such as Osama bin Laden, he was a cleric, so he could present himself as a leading religious figure. Second, because al-Awlaki had spent much of his adult life in the States, he communicated with his followers in colloquial, accessible American English.

President Obama and a small team of senior national security officials were in the unusual position of acting as al-Awlaki's jury, judges, and de facto executioners.

Compounding Iraq's problem is that its economy is highly dependent on oil.

For many, embracing the ideology of Osama bin Laden or ISIS allowed them to become the heroes of their own story as well as actors in a cosmic crusade. For others, a 'cognitive opening' to militant Islam was often precipitated by a personal disappointment or loss.

There are all sorts of despicable people who journalists have done interviews with, and it's been useful. Isn't more information better than less information?

Nothing is more powerful than hearing from former members of the group that ISIS is not creating an Islamist utopia in the areas it controls, but a hell on earth.

Since Snowden went public, companies such as Apple and Google - two of the world's most valuable companies - have incorporated much greater encryption into their products and have also been at pains to show that they will not go along with U.S. government demands to access their encrypted products.

Officials in the George W. Bush administration later criticized the cruise missile strikes that were ordered by President Bill Clinton in Afghanistan in 1998 as only 'pounding sand.'

For Islamist terrorist groups such as ISIS, the holy month of Ramadan - a time of fasting and prayer for the vast majority of Muslims - is seen as a particularly auspicious time to launch terrorist attacks.

The hard reality is that attacks by vehicles in public places are very hard to defend against in a free and open society. The best defense against such attacks is good intelligence, and that often comes from inside the Muslim community.

Western Mosul is the historic heart of one of the oldest cities in the world. Its narrow streets and alleyways are impassable for armored vehicles.

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

So the insurgency was born in a perfect storm of American errors--not establishing order; not providing the semblance of any government; confirming to the Sunnis who had once lorded it over Iraq's Shia majority that they were officially the underdogs; and throwing hundreds of thousands of soldiers onto the streets in an economy where the jobless rate was around 50 percent, while simultaneously ensuring that there was an unlimited supply of weaponry at hand for those angry young men.

Obama would prove to be one of the most militarily aggressive American presidents in decades. He authorized military operations in seven Muslim countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen; mandated a troop surge in Afghanistan; and vastly ramped up the CIA drone program. And he became the first president since the Civil War to authorize the assassination of a U.S. citizen: Anwar al-Awlaki.

The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think it's accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant.

The most deadly jihadist attacks in the United States since 9/11, and the most threatening plots, have been carried out by or instigated by Americans.

Some kind of personal crisis (the loss of a job, the experience of racism, moral outrage caused by the way Muslims were being treated in international conflicts, or the death of a close family member) provided a "cognitive opening" for a turn to Salafi beliefs

It also imposed Taliban-style rule (a draconian implementation of sharia, or Koranic, law that has involved throwing homosexuals to their deaths from tall buildings, lopping off the hands of thieves, beheading women accused of "sorcery," and enslaving and raping minority women) over some eight million Syrians and Iraqis. Within

since 9/11 the FBI has instigated more jihadist terrorist "plots" in the States than al-Qaeda or any of its affiliated groups—thirty versus ten. Undercover