Author Archives: Peter Bergen

The Taliban is not just a home-grown Afghan problem, but it will require a partly Afghan solution. If we don't recognise this now, the country will end up in a worse state than Iraq

Everyone has a theory about the real causes of 9/11. They range from the nutty (it was the US government) to the plausible but flawed (a response to foreign occupation) to the credible (collateral damage from a clash within Islam)

The influential BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares" argued that al Qaeda is largely a phantom of the US national security apparatus's imagination. Even before the bombs in London, the thesis deserved scepticism. The Bush administration in fact ignored Islamic…