229 Quotes by Peter Bergen

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?

Afghanistan's winters in the north are legendarily harsh, and southern Afghanistan, by contrast, is bleak desert. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that Afghanistan is one of the world's most heavily mined countries.

The commonly accepted definition of terrorism is that it is politically motivated violence directed at civilians by entities other than a state. These kind of attacks can come from the far right, the far left, racists of every stripe, as well as jihadists.

The civil war across the Middle East between the Shia and the Sunni empowers groups like ISIS and al Qaeda who claim to be the defenders of Sunni rights against Shia attack.

The rise of ISIS starts with a Jordanian thug named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who founded ISIS' parent organization, al Qaeda, in Iraq. What gave Zarqawi the opportunity to create al Qaeda in Iraq? It was, of course, George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

As early as 1993, members of bin Laden's group had been planning an attack on the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

Think of ISIS as a pathogen that preys on weak hosts in the Muslim world. In fact, there is something of a political law: The weaker a Muslim state, the stronger will be the presence of ISIS or like-minded groups.

The diagnosis that poverty, lack of education, or lack of opportunities have much to do with terrorism requires a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This diagnosis leads to the prognosis that all we need to do to solve the terrorism problem is to create societies that are less poor, better educated and have more opportunities.

The reason that attacks by American terrorists who are not jihadist militants are sometimes not called 'terrorism' is, in part, because in the United States, terrorism is a crime which has to be in some way be associated with a 'designated' terrorist group such as ISIS.