PANELISTS: RICHARD BUTLER, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS; SOPHIA CLEMENT, FRENCH MINISTRY OF DEFENSE, MANSOOR IJAZ, CRESCENT INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT, LLC; RICHARD PERLE, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE, WASHINGTON, D.C. November 30, 2001, noon
On the morning of September 11th when I went in to get ready and came out, the first building was on fire. It's like you wipe your eyes and say, what is this? This can't be happening to us. I turned the TV on. I immediately ran out to the balcony to see, without windows, whether this was for real, and just as I went outside, the second airplane hit the building. I can tell you that it was an impulse reaction that I had. I fell to my knees, and the first two words out of my mouth were, "They're here." The point of telling you that is that some of us, Richard Perle being among them, have known for a very long time that something bad could happen. The question that we have to ask ourselves is not just what we do out there, whether it's Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran, or Sudan or Yemen or any other place, but also what do we have to do right here under our own feet. For me the real national security threat that we face is here. They're already here. They're like seeds that have been sown for years and years and years, just waiting around to figure out how and when to do what they want. Now as a scientist and an engineer and as a Wall Street financier, I bring two very critical aspects of this problem, and why I put my life at risk to do the things that I am going to describe here in a few minutes. That is that as an engineer you think about experiments -- what's the problem, and how are you going to solve that problem. You have a purpose, you have procedures, you have the data, and you come to a conclusion somehow or another. As a financier you have the very difficult task of having to worry about the bottom line every day. Pragmatism is what really is needed in this problem. There is no time, no more room to talk about theory any more. This is a real problem and we have to come up with real, pragmatic solutions. Now if you think about the motivation, what drives people to think about how to solve these problems -- I come from a slightly different political persuasion than my friend Richard Perle, but I can tell you the speech that got me interested in finding a way to tackle Islamic fundamentalism and the root causes of what I call this militant Islamism that has taken root in different parts of the world, was a speech that President Clinton made in 1993 at a fundraiser in New York for Patrick Moynihan, in which he described America as a column, essentially, and at the bottom of that column we had an underclass that was growing and in that underclass you had people who were just losing hope, day after day after day. And the more of them that folded their tent and fell down, the greater the risk was that the entire column would topple over. Now if you take that statement about what the problem is in the United States and you extrapolate it to what we're dealing with today, these are not poor people. Osama bin Laden and his cohorts, as has been said many times today, are a bunch of rich, spoiled brats. They couldn't rise up against their fascist fathers, they couldn't rise up against their fascist governments, and then when they wanted to rise up against the fascist states in which many of them live, they said, the United States, they're protecting these guys. We are an open society, and that is why they came after us. Now, from a procedural standpoint, when I decided to involve myself in these issues with hands-on efforts, the first thing I thought about was, what causes these people to do what they're doing? So I wanted to confront the visceral cause, which is corruption. In the Islamic world, with the exception of Turkey, and maybe today it's starting to get that way in Indonesia, you had massively corrupt governments in every single Islamic state. That corruption was breeding at the lower end of the society, all that underclass, if I may put it that way. They were all falling down. They were all saying, we give up. We can't do it any more. So they turned to what was left, and for them what was left was the Koran. What was left were the mullahs and the mosques. What was left were the madrassah schools that were like social welfare centers. That's all it was. I'm going to lay out first what I felt the procedural process had to be, and then second I'm going to give you what were my data points. So how did I conduct this experiment in counter-terrorism. The second key procedure was understanding the psychology of the networks, going into the midst. Now because I'm a Muslim, it was much easier for me to go into those networks than it would have been for Richard Perle to go into those networks. Maybe Richard reads Arabic and knows the Koran, but certainly I could look at a guy like Hussan Thorabi (ph) in the Sudan and say, I read the same Koran you do. Where does it say that you can kill innocent people? It doesn't say that anywhere. He couldn't pull a surah out of the Koran and tell me that there was a difference between what he thought and what I thought. Finally -- and this is probably most important and most relevant for me because I live with money all day long -- is unraveling the financial networks. Now the data in this goes like the following. In April of 1995, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto came to Washington. We held her up as a beacon of our American ideals, sent her back with her F-16 money back, or something like that. And what happens? They decide they want to do dirty arms deals. I then said, this is enough. The corruption in that society was starting to seep to such a level that even my grandmother, who lives in Lahore, God rest her soul, was paying more for a telephone bill than I pay in New York City. Now who is responsible for that? Who was responsible for assuring the IMF and the World Bank and all the monies that were coming in would get paid back from these rates? Who made those paradigms? Yes, Benazir is the one who ensured that that money got in somehow or other, but we cannot alleviate ourselves of responsibility in that regard either. Then I wrote in the Wall Street Journal in June and October of 1996 about first how they were stealing the money systematically from the state coffers, and then what they were actually doing with it. And the idea was that if we remove a corrupt regime, if they cannot be held accountable by their own press, by their own systems and checks and balances, then by God we'd better do it from the outside. Because I'm of Pakistani origin, I took that task on unilaterally. Nobody asked me to, nobody said, go out and do this. I did this because I thought it was the right thing to do, because that would remove one layer of the problems that we're dealing with.
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The second data point, and it started more or less simultaneously with the effort in Pakistan, was to unravel the networks of these Islamic fanatics. And for that I went to the Sudan because the Sudan at that time in this recent past history was organizing and holding these Islamic conferences and every nut group in the world would show up in Khartoum once a year, and they would all sit there and the United States thought that these guys were planning terrorist attacks against us. I went there and saw it for myself, and it turned out that these were actually pressure valves. This was a way to try and find a mechanism to let these guys pontificate and get all of that negative energy out of their systems and just relieve themselves of whatever anger they had. Then the Sudan made an extraordinary offer. In February 1996 they sent their intelligence people here to Washington. They offered to arrest bin Laden, extradite him to Saudi Arabia. We turned them down. In May of 1996 we deliver a threat to the government of the Sudan. If you do not stop planning terrorist attacks against the United States -- and I quote now from the non-paper that was delivered -- we will take measures that will make you pay a high price. That will include international isolation, the destruction of your economy, and military measures that will make you pay a high price. So here we are, after they offer to help us resolve this problem on a terrorism level. Forget about slavery and human rights violations, all that other stuff. I'm not saying that I'm going to alleviate them of those problems. But our concern and the first concern was terrorism, Islamic extremism, and we had to unravel that network. And what do we do? Please ask Mr. bin Laden to leave. We don't care where he goes, but if he leaves, we will relieve you of sanctions. He left, we put more sanctions on the Sudan. I went to the Sudan in July of 1996 and brought back from there within four or five months -- in the first visit I got Thorabi to write a letter to President Clinton, and in that letter he essentially offered an olive branch. Let's find a way to work together. I've got an idea of how to fix these guys, and we can share that data with you directly. That wasn't good enough either. I went back again. Now I got the president of the Sudan, in April of 1997, to give a counter- terrorism offer to the Clinton administration that compromised the sovereignty of his government. Please bring your FBI and CIA counter- terrorism units into the Sudan and have a look anywhere you want to go. It was an unobstructed offer. They were going to open their files, share the data, everything was available. I'm telling you this now. This is all going to come out in the very near future exactly what was available at that time. Again, we looked the other way. The point I'm trying to make here is that we had repeated opportunities to do this the right way, to unravel this network before it got so dangerous that it could do what they did to us on September 11th, and that should never, ever happen again in the United States of America. We'd better make sure that people who care about our country, whether they're Arabs or Muslims or Jews or Christians, Hindus, atheists -- it doesn't matter who they are, what they believe in. But when you stand up as an American, you'd better make sure this government had better never again, no government in this country, can ignore these kind of efforts that are made by governments abroad. To say, you know what, maybe we didn't get everything right. Maybe we didn't understand what it was that we're doing, and we're prepared to come clean, we're prepared to change our ways. We have to open that door as well. Finally, in 1999 when the coup took place in Pakistan, there was a great deal of concern here in Washington about the ability of the Indians and the Pakistanis to communicate now. Where Nawaz Sharif had done a great job in bringing the Indian prime minister to Pakistan and Vajpayee had stood up and said, we accept Pakistan as a reality, and then Nouan sent his troops up to Kargil at the same time. Wonderful diplomacy, I remember. So I tried to open a channel between India and Pakistan, and I went into India, talked to the Kashmiris. I talked to the Indians. I then went into Pakistan and talked to them as well. And as I got to know the jihadi groups, all these groups that are fighting their war in Kashmir, as I got to know them, what I learned was that the system of financing this entire effort, that system was so intricate and so well oiled and so widespread, it was like looking at a spider web across the entire surface of the globe. And there was nothing that our modern systems could do to stop that. I spent four months in Dubai just unraveling it piece by piece by piece to see how it all worked. Then we got the mujaheddin first to give a ceasefire, then we got the Indian government to extend and make that ceasefire almost a permanent ceasefire. The point I'm making to you is that again we had an opportunity to do something right and we couldn't get people here at a political level to understand the value of engaging these people. They're human beings after all. Yes, if they're prepared to destroy us or hurt us, we have to defend ourselves. But maybe we'd better next time go and have a look at what they are, who they are and what their problems are before we start lobbing cruise missiles and hitting them from afar. With that data, the conclusion that I will come to is the following. Essentially terrorism is a virus of the mind. You can't see it, you can't feel it, you can't touch it until it's too late. A lot of people here today said poverty is not the problem. But let me tell you where poverty is a problem. Poverty is a problem because it allows masses of people to be subjected to and opportunistically used for the game that people that Osama bin Laden want to play. Pakistan is 140 million people. You think he went to Afghanistan just for the hell of it? He went there because he had a mass of people that he could get behind him had he had a little bit more time, and maybe even a little bit more money. That's where poverty plays in. Second, we're going to need help in three critical areas from our allies in other parts of the world. Not our Western allies but our Islamic world allies. The first area is intelligence, and there Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and India -- India is the second largest Muslim country in the world; many of you may not know that. Has the second largest population of Muslims anywhere in the world. These countries have to help us unravel these networks. Pakistan's ISI, in my judgment, has for a long time been a state institution within the state doing nothing but funding and encouraging the Arabization of the conflict in Kashmir. And it's that Arabization that caused the problems that we have in that part of the world today. Second, we're going to need a lot of help in methods. There our friends in Turkey can be of enormous help to us. I have Turkish partners in my firm, and I can tell you that when you go to Turkey, you actually feel very safe. There's no terrorism there any more. There's nothing. It's a safe place. So we need to learn what their methods are. Finally, we need to get Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries to deal with the issue of funding these radical nuts. There is no concept of religion, no wahabbi-ism, no Islam that I can imagine -- you know, my parents lived in Saudi Arabia for four years. There is nothing there that justifies any complicity on the part of the Saudi government, the Saudi royal family, or its extended members in allowing the financing of the jihad. There is no jihad that is worth what they have done in that part of the world. I think we have to think about this problem as a combined effort. Where are our failures and where are their failures? Our failures are not as clear as theirs, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to work together. Thank you very much. |