A new breed of terrorism

This certainly seems like an expertly executed operation. What do you think of the suggestion that bin Laden might be responsible?

There are reasons to think that. It's an act that conforms with the war paradigm, and it's in line with things he's done before. It's violence used as a way of waging war, in which the proportion is not important -- the more people who die the better. Hamas is the same way. They're fighting a religious war. There's the scope of the attack, the attack on the Pentagon, which is the quintessential military target. And while the World Trade Center isn't a government building, it's a symbol of U.S. economic power and supremacy. They also clearly wanted to maximize damage.

Some other things that tend to point in bin Laden's direction is that he's managed to pull off simultaneous stunts like this before; that's what he did with the embassy bombings. And he has quite an extensive intelligence network. On the other hand, there are others it might be. It might be state-sponsored, though I find that hard to believe. That's a declaration of war, and whatever nation that got caught doing it knows they'd be carpeted with bombs. It's possible, though; these people are not always rational. Another thing is that no one has claimed credit. In the old days, we'd be getting faxed from three or four different groups, each one saying "We did it." But when you're fighting a war, the objective is to inflict casualties. You don't need to say it was you.

But in a war you usually know who your opponent is and what he wants. What does bin Laden ultimately hope to achieve with this?

I read his declaration of war. I believe that they assume that the resolve of the U.S. is weak and that they could force the U.S. to bow out, to withdraw much as the Viet Cong got us to withdraw from Vietnam. Only in very extreme cases is the violence an end in itself, but for them the goal is so big that they just want to do as much damage as they can. It's also important that they do have a religious imperative, what they see as a duty to resist even if it's hopeless. In any case, they think the American commitment is weak and that as soon as people start dying they'll withdraw.

That doesn't seem likely. Instead, people are calling for retaliation.

I'm curious to see how it will turn out. If it's bin Laden who's responsible, I have no idea what they'll do to stop it from happening again that wouldn't be fairly useless. Ronald Reagan bombed the PLO in Tunis in the '80s, but the PLO had a headquarters with filing cabinets and that sort of thing. If the U.S. wanted to take it out, they could. They could drop bombs on Libya and send a message. If it's a state, you invade it or bomb it; it's straightforward. But I think Clinton's reaction to the bombing of the African embassies was not useful. They bombed a few training camps in Afghanistan. And they destroyed them, but that infrastructure is not that valuable. It doesn't cost much to set up camp someplace else.

What makes an organization like bin Laden's so hard to strike at?

It's decentralized and loose. There's no core that you can take out. It's tricky to neutralize them. They use satellite phones, chat rooms, CD-ROMS and the Internet to communicate and coordinate their activities. The technology is something that's new that allows them to be nimble and flexible to pull off these stunts. It's pretty scary. Apocalyptic scenarios have been drawn up in past, but no one believed it would happen. And this surpasses anything that anyone imagined.

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