| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Martin Smith Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 7 of 8
Your most recent film is called "In Search of Al Qaeda." You're going to be showing that tonight on the Berkeley campus. It has already aired on PBS. Tell us a little about the development of that project, and then we'll talk about what you learned.
It's different in a fundamental way. I had lunch with David Fanning, the executive
producer of Frontline, and we were talking about on how we were going
to continue looking, [about] what would be a useful next project to get more
understanding of al Qaeda and what's happening. He suggested that I forego the
normal research process and 
I
simply go over to Pakistan and other places and take a look at what's happened
to al Qaeda since the bombing of Afghanistan that happened after 9/11. And go
not knowing what I would find, and to film the research process.
As I said before, normally you go and you do months of research, and you pre-interview, and you do all this sorting out of what's going to be useful. This one, we just jumped in and started filming the research process. He also said to me, "Put yourself in the film and make your process of discovery part of the storytelling." So I stepped out from the other side of the camera and I became part of it. We didn't know what we would find, exactly.
David said, "Look, I don't even know what these places look like, the tribal areas of Pakistan and the mountains along the border. I'm reading about these places and I don't know what they look like. Can you at least just go over there and bring back the kind of sense of where they're hiding, even if you don't find Osama?" I didn't really know what I would do if I found Osama. I probably wouldn't be here talking to you! But, you know, "Let's see it." So it was a very simple idea.
Had you been there before?
No. In 1998 I had done work in Africa, in the Comores Islands near Madagascar, off the coast, where one of the bombers was from. I'd been to the Sudan, and during the Gulf War I'd been to Saudi Arabia. But I'd never been to Pakistan. The programs that I did after 9/11 had very short turnarounds, so I stayed in the edit room and I sent various reporters out to some of these places -- Pakistan and Afghanistan. So I hadn't been myself, until this program.
When we read about Pakistan, one of the things that comes out is that there are large areas that are often not under the control of the state -- the president or the army. You seem to have found that on the spot, you kept running into that. Especially you were trying to understand the so-called tribal areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it's not clear who's in charge -- or if anyone is, it might be al Qaeda.
Yes. It's clear that the government is not in charge of these areas. I was standing with the general of the Pakistani Frontier Corps, and he had on his wall a huge map, and there were large splotches of red on it. I said "What are the red zones on that map?" He said, "Those are the areas where the Pakistani army has never been. We've never been in those areas. They've been off limits."
And "never" means "never" here?
Never.
I see.
The country was founded after World War II, in 1947, in the partition [of colonial India]. Never been. They don't control these areas. These are in the control of Pashtuns, the tribal people, and they survive on growing heroin and selling guns, and some farming, and they fight each other. But the outside forces -- and that means the Pakistani army -- are not allowed into those places.
In fact, in parts of this [film], you were not able to go in. You had to send someone who had originated from that part of the country.
Right. There have been a few print reporters, and I give them credit for getting in there at one point. But by the time we got to Pakistan that had stopped. There are many, many checkpoints, and even if you get past the checkpoint (and we did get past some) you're persona non grata. And it's very hard to blend in in these places; they know who you are right away. So I hired a Pashtun tribesman, trained him how to use a camera -- he was already pretty skilled in it -- and sent him with the list of questions and places to visit, and he worked as our proxy. So you have to figure out ways to get around the restrictions.
In fact, he actually taped a raid in one case.
Yes.
It has the quality of the first take in a Stephen Spielberg "Indiana Jones" movie, if I may say that.
We're still working with him, too. He's a really special guy.
The reporter?
Hayat Ullah Khan. He's a brave soul. Pashtun. Doesn't speak [much] English -- he's learning. He went to these places and saw assaults made by the local police or the Pakistani army in some places where they're now trying to operate, bombing houses of some of the al Qaeda suspects. Generally, they've lost a lot of these battles. They haven't been able to arrest about half of the people they've tried to.
The FBI and the CIA can't easily go into these places either. They've had some very, very limited access. There's a handful of FBI listening posts where they listen on satellite phone calls and do what they call signal intelligence. They're not really allowed into these places. I've said, if you want to look at American soldiers looking for al Qaeda, go to Afghanistan; if you want to find al Qaeda, go across the border to Pakistan, where the Americans aren't. Because that's a no-brainer as to where bin Laden and his folks hide out.
It's a kind of a shock for the public, because we went in to Afghanistan; we "won" -- you know, in quotes. But in fact, one gets a sense of the adversary escaping into the woodwork.
Think about it. We went to Afghanistan. What is any terrorist based in Afghanistan going to do? On one side is the Pakistan tribal areas -- a vast area, by the way, if you include Baluchistan in southern Pakistan, which is also, some of it, off limits to the central authority. On the other side, you've got Iran. We can't send U.S. troops into Iran, or we haven't yet. And then in the north, places like Uzbekistan, which are under nominal control, many of the areas in the periphery are not under total control of the government. These are weak governments. You've got places like Yemen, where there's, again, large tribal areas. Where are you going to go? You're obviously going to get out of Afghanistan and go to these places. There are many islands in Indonesia. You've got Bangladesh. There are so many places in the world that it's easier to hide.
I think Americans have this notion that when we launch the war on terrorism, we're turning over rocks and looking behind trees everywhere. But, really, we went to Afghanistan and have sent small numbers of investigators to other places. We rely on those countries to root out al Qaeda. The problem with that is that these local governments either are not in control or don't have our interests in mind. They're not as interested in rooting al Qaeda for a host of complex reasons. The purpose of that film is to show that war on the ground is a lot more complicated than you've been led to believe.
This war against al Qaeda, and our allies in that war, and the nature of the adversary, really come out in two interviews, which we'll touch on briefly. One is the interview with the President of Pakistan, Musharraf, which you conduct, and at which he is less than honest about the raid on the al Qaeda camps during the Clinton administration. Tell us a little about that. The quizzical look that he gave you as you confronted him with known facts about what had happened.
Yes, they're certainly facts that he had to know, unless he was just having some kind of "senior moment"! Getting up there myself, I'll allow that. But I don't know....
The problem is that the Pakistani government depends on these radical jihad groups to keep pressure on India in the war on Kashmir, so the intelligence services of Pakistan have even encouraged jihadis to take training in some of the al Qaeda camps.
I was pointing this out to him in the interview, and I pointed out that he knew about these, and was this factor in not being able to crack down. And he was skirting around this delicate issue because he is ostensibly a great ally on the war on terrorism. But he's not cracking down on these jihad groups. And then he was trying to deny that these jihad groups had any connection with al Qaeda. And then on camera, what you see is that I pointed out that, "When we attacked with missiles in '98, after the Africa embassy bombings, an al Qaeda camp where bin Laden was about to be, we ended up killing 22 members of a Pakistani jihad group." And he said, "Oh, I ... " and he started to say he didn't remember it, or didn't know about it. Well, that's just ... it's not reasonable. It wasn't that complicated of a question.
He's in a difficult position. The elections in Pakistan have created a problem for him, because they're joining in the war on terrorism, and now they're losing the support of their people, because their people are very sympathetic to al Qaeda.
The second interview was with an Islamic woman, who -- was she from Yemen?
Yes. Yes, she was Yemeni.
She was a Yemeni who before our very eyes manifested an extreme support for al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. She looked traditional and modern at the same time. She was very articulate. And in the course of your questioning, it was very clear that she is someone who is very mobilizable in some future struggle. Talk a little about that.
Well, she says, in fact, that she's raising her son to become an Osama bin Laden.
And she would be proud.
And she would be proud of that. She would be proud to help them financially or in any other way that she could, and that, when she saw the events of 9/11, she cried with joy, and tears were brought to her eyes that Chaikoff Osama was, in some way, addressing their grief and was paying back in revenge for their tears. She said that she loves him -- Osama.
What happened in that interview is that she was able to speak some English, but we conducted most of the interview in Arabic. Then at some point I asked her to speak in English. And it's as if suddenly the movie changes to 3-D and she steps out into your living room a lot closer, because she's been speaking through a translator. And, suddenly, she begins to speak in English and saying these things like "I love him," speaking about Osama bin Laden. I mean, it was shocking to me, sitting there listening to her. What makes her modern is that she's so well-educated. She has also quite a beautiful face. But she has the view that Osama is the answer. I was dumbfounded from the moment I met her.
But she's not [unique]. All of my experience in traveling around from the first times that I went to Kenya, to the African embassy bombings, was the depth of reverence for bin Laden. A lot of people say it's the depth of anti-Americanism, but I've actually felt that it's a depth of reverence for him. When Clinton sent missiles firing into Sudan, they hit the pharmaceutical plant, and when they fired them into this camp and killed all those jihadis in Afghanistan, I think a lot of people stood up and said, "My goodness, this guy must be somebody. The American military is willing to expend all these missiles on him. He must really be somebody." They felt they had somebody.
And there are elements of his character, his presentation in his leadership that strike a resonant chord in Islamic culture, at least in parts of it.
A number of people have mentioned that he must have studied descriptions of Prophet Muhammad's behavior and methods that he imitates consciously, this calmness, and he uses some of the same language. He very much positions himself as a prophet. I can't be the judge of how well he does that because I don't speak Arabic. But, yes, he has very effectively played off of those connections, those myths or those stories about Prophet Muhammad.
I get the sense from what you said and what your documentaries reveal that sometimes our policies do not work toward undermining his success, that they tend to have the opposite effect.
Well, yes. Like I said, when we fired missiles off at them suddenly ...
I was at a mosque in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the day that those missiles were fired into those camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. It was a dicey situation. There was a lot of anger. I could see clearly that we made an instant hero. And I'm not saying we shouldn't be going after him. We have to, but we also have to be attendant to the problems that have created him, and to the sensitivities of the people and their predilection towards following him, and address some of those issue as well. I think the social side of the war on terrorism has been comparatively ignored. We've gone after this as a law-and-order affair. And we, appropriately, I think in many cases, are going after and finding out where the terrorist cells are and busting them up. But we're not attending to, as one person put it, "the swamp from which the mosquitoes are coming." We're not draining the swamp.
Next page: Conclusion
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