Al Qaeda at the Office

This is absolutely fascinating--almost too fascinating to make political points with it. It's an Atlantic Monthly article written by a WSJ reporter who lucked into buying Ayman al-Zawahiri's abandoned laptop in Kabul in Fall 2001 in the wake of the US invasion. It's just surpassingly strange to read Bin Laden's chief deputy bitching out a subordinate for abusing the company credit card:

6- Please explain the cell-phone invoice amounting to $756 (2,800 riyals) when you have mentioned communication expenses of $300.

7- Why are you renovating the computer? Have I been informed of this?

I said"almost" too fascinating to make political points with it. But not quite. So, for starters,"The computer did not reveal any links to Iraq or any other deep-pocketed government." What a surprise!

And, in the" calm down, get ahold of yourself" category, there's this:

In 1999 al-Zawahiri undertook a top-secret program to develop chemical and biological weapons, a program he and others referred to on the computer as the"Yogurt" project. Though fearsome in its intent, the program had a proposed start-up budget of only $2,000 to $4,000. Fluent in English and French, al-Zawahiri began by studying foreign medical journals.

Among those are such up-to-date tracts as"mid-twentieth-century articles from, among other sources, Science, The Journal of Immunology, and The New England Journal of Medicine, and ... such books as Tomorrow's Weapons (1964), Peace or Pestilence (1949), and Chemical Warfare (1921)."

Of all the things to keep us up at night, perhaps AQ's homegrown dog-poisoning arsenal shouldn't be one of them.

Of course, they do seem to have a decent grip on grand strategy:

Like the early Russian anarchists who wrote some of the most persuasive tracts on the uses of terror, al-Qaeda understood that its attacks would not lead to a quick collapse of the great powers. Rather, its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back in a way that would create sympathy for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has so far gained little from the ground war in Afghanistan; the conflict in Iraq, closer to the center of the Arab world, is potentially more fruitful. As Arab resentment against the United States spreads, al-Qaeda may look less like a tightly knit terror group and more like a mass movement. And as the group develops synergy in working with other groups branded by the United States as enemies (in Iraq, the Israeli-occupied territories, Kashmir, the Mindanao Peninsula, and Chechnya, to name a few places), one wonders if the United States is indeed playing the role written for it on the computer.