PREVIEW: SPECIAL EDITION - What happened to al-Qaeda? Will Kaback interviews American journalist Graeme Wood.
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What is the historical context of al‑Qaeda 25 years after 9/11?
Хело екмтонгл подкаст. This is senior editor Will K back. It's been nearly twenty five years since the attacks on September eleventh, two thousand one. Virtually all of the leadership of Al-Qaeda that planned and orchestrated the attacks have now been killed, but the group remains intact today, and in some ways is as widespread as it's ever been. If you talk to national security and terrorism experts, they'll offer wildly different assessments of how strong and how much of a threat Al Qaeda still poses. Grahamwood is an American journalist and a longtime writer on the Middle East, terrorism, and political Islam, whose reporting has frequently explored issues related to terrorism and the nine eleven attacks in Al Qaeda.
Earlier this month, he published a piece in the Atlantic with a simple provocative title. What happened to Al Qaeda? In it, Wood explores competing views of whether the organization was strategically brilliant. catastrophically incompetent, quietly resurgent, or simply no longer the force it once was. I wanted to talk to him to dig deeper into this question and to hear his thoughts on what Al Qaeda's trajectory reveals about America's response to terrorism, the unintended consequences of US foreign policy, and the difficulty of knowing when a seemingly diminished threat. Is genuinely gone. So here's my conversation with Graham Wood.
Graham, thanks so much for joining the show. It's a pleasure to be with you.
How does Graeme Wood’s journalistic background shape his coverage of terrorism?
So for our listeners who uh are not familiar with your work, could you just start off by giving us a little bit about your background and what your coverage beat is at the Atlantic?
Yeah, I I sort of came of age during the nine eleven era. I graduated from university right when the attacks happened. And so when I became a journalist, i it it's really defined um my professional life and in a way, you know, all of our histories as as Americans. So at the Atlantic I I've covered a lot of different things, everything from fresh professional wrestling to meteorology. But the uh the thing that I've really kept on coming back to is geopolitics and especially the geopolitics of the Middle East. and the different types of uh terrorism that have been associated with that topic.
I know you have traveled the world in the course of that reporting too, and that's brought you to a lot of the locations where you report from in the Middle East today. Uh, and when you're reporting a story like the one we're gonna talk about today on Al Qaeda, is that one where you find yourself traveling to the locations to talk to people? Could you just give us a little bit more background about like the actual process of reporting stories like this? Sure. I mean
th there's two different stages. There's having a kind of deep background in the region, just knowing a bit about it, having a sense of what it's like to be in places and what people think about on a day to day basis. So so that's the kind of deep background of of reporting. And then yeah, uh whenever possible you want to find out what
What reporting methods does Wood use when covering al‑Qaeda in the field?
is happening right now. You wanna go to the place, you wanna talk to the people who are directly involved in a story. And obviously with with terrorism There are uh difficulties with that. There's people who, you know, actively want to kill you if you try to interview them. And then there's other people who actively want to kill you, but also are really, really talkative. And so a lot of what I do is is trying to sort of hit the sweet spot of going places where I can find people who are uh willing to talk to me. and uh who won't kill me in the process. Um luckily they're a lot of them are very talkative, so it it means that over the years I've regularly gone to Iraq, to Egypt, to um Pakistan, to some of the the the places where are pretty obvious in in the reporting of this story.
We'll be right back after this quick break.
And turning to this story in particular, which talks about where Al-Qaeda is today and the threat that it does or does not pose today, you know, roughly twenty-five years removed from the nine-eleven attacks.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the historical context of al‑Qaeda 25 years after 9/11?
0:08–2:01
2
How does Graeme Wood’s journalistic background shape his coverage of terrorism?
2:01–3:27
3
What reporting methods does Wood use when covering al‑Qaeda in the field?
3:27–5:08
4
Why did Wood decide to write a story on al‑Qaeda now, after so many years?
5:08–6:48
5
What are the two main schools of thought about al‑Qaeda’s current strength?
6:48–8:14
6
Why do some experts argue that al‑Qaeda is stronger and more dangerous than ever?
8:14–9:23
7
What evidence do analysts cite to claim al‑Qaeda is weak or nearly extinct today?
9:23–10:46
8
How did bin Laden’s original strategy fail, and what does that reveal about al‑Qaeda’s trajectory?
10:46–13:35
Speakers
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