The article in January's Vanity Fair begins:
POLITICS
Bin Laden’s Lonely Crusade
A decade after White House aide Richard Clarke’s famous memo warning against al-Qaeda, it’s time for a reality check: the 9/11 attacks did not achieve what Osama bin Laden had hoped, and the list of his enemies is growing. Keeping the threat in perspective is the surest way to prevail.
By Peter Bergen•Illustration by Brad Holland
Bin Laden has become a legend in his own time, whatever fate he finally faces. Here are some things I wrote about him in my newspaper column, Attorney at Large, over the years:
Roundup: Media's Take
James Castagnera: Osama bin Laden Is Our Sci-Fi Nightmare
SOURCE: Delaware County and the Lehighton (PA) Times-News (8-14-06)
[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column ìAttorney at Large.]
The future is now. We live in a Sci-Fi world: supersonic flight and space travel; cloning and organ transplants; computers and artificial intelligence; weapons of mass destruction and stealth bombers. The best evidence of our having entered the realms of fantasy and science fiction is Osama bin Laden.
Our Western world imagined Osama bin Laden long before he was born. He is Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty. He is Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu. He would like to become Marvel Comic’s Ming the Merciless.
Professor Moriarty is described by his chief antagonist, Sherlock Holmes, as “the Napoleon of Crime.” Moriarty lurks in the shadows, masterminding murder and mayhem, and even influencing world affairs. In The Final Solution the two opponents finally meet face to face atop Switzerland’s 200-foot Reisenbach Falls, apparently falling together to their deaths. The U.S. armed forces hoped for such a final solution for Osama among the craggy peaks of Afghanistan, but so far our modern-day Napoleon of Crime has apparently not obliged.
Fu Manchu prefigures Osama. A villain out of the mysterious East --- albeit Far, not Middle, East --- he is described in The Insidious Fu Manchu as “a person, tall, lean and feline, high shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present…. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.” I don’t know about Shakespeare’s brow or the cat-green eyes, but otherwise, couldn’t this fit our image of bin Laden?
Last is Ming. Flash Gordon’s nemesis is our worst nightmare… Osama bin Laden triumphant, the leader of a fundamentalist-Islamic empire arrayed in undying enmity against our “decadent” West. Ming’s empire, “Mingo,” intent upon enslaving the galaxy, is armed with rocket ships, robots and death rays. Ming, whose name sounds Asian, resembles Fu Manchu. In the 1980 movie “Flash Gordon,” Max Von Sydow (of all people) captures the Asian-super-villain look perfectly: shaved head, angular jet-black eyebrows and goatee, slanting eyes that stare right through you.
Where the heck is Osama bin Laden and what exactly is al-Qaeda? And the biggest question of them all: With all our computers, and supersonic aircraft, and satellites and even a space station, plus our nukes and other assorted weapons of mass destruction… with all our sci-fi gadgets, why can’t America catch and kill this guy?
Perhaps he’s no longer human.
Sure, laugh at me if you must. But I say that in a world where Google can give me 25,700,000 hits on “Osama bin Laden” in .07 seconds (try it yourself); where airliners travel at 600 miles per hour, seven miles high, in air temperatures of 50 to 60 degrees below zero to deliver me from Philly to London in some six hours; and where a futuristic stealth bomber can deliver a nuclear device capable of killing millions in a millisecond and never even be detected by the victims’ radar… in a world like this, our worst recurring nightmares can become reality.
If you can’t buy that hypothesis, then try this one on for size: If Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda didn’t exist, someone would have invented them. This theory has plenty of precedents. In the hard-coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania in the 1870s, every murder and act of arson was blamed on the “Molly Maguires,” an alleged secret society of Irish terrorists. Throughout much of the 20th century organized crime was equated to the “Mafia.” Yet, as Italian writer Luigi Barzini once said, “Almost everything is known about the Mafia except whether or not it really exists.” During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Anarchists assassinated half a dozen western leaders including our own President McKinley. Yet Anarchism is an idea that eschews formal organization. We seem to need labels like these to make some sense of our violent world.
The plot foiled by the Brits last week is a 21st century case on point. The plan was to blow up airliners. The method was seriously sci-fi. Bombs were to be assembled from harmless-looking carry-on items ignited by digital cameras. The culprits are British citizens. None carried an al Qaeda membership card when captured.
In our sci-fi world, Osama bin Laden no longer needs to be alive at all. Digital technology can produce tapes of the legendary terrorist leader talking to his admirers. The messages can be beamed around the globe at the speed of light. Like Moriarty, Fu Manchu, and Ming the Merciless, an imaginary bin Laden can be as effective an enemy of the West as any flesh-and-blood human being… maybe more so. Perhaps he really still exists, but he no longer needs to.
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What is a Hero?
Students Agree on Villains But Have Difficulty Identifying Heroes — Except Close to Home
By James Ottavio Castagnera
From the April 2003 AAHEBulletin.com
Hero: any person admired for courage, nobility, or exploits, esp. in war... any person admired for qualities or achievements and regarded as an ideal or model.
— Webster's New World College Dictionary (4th ed. 1999)
On a snowy evening in February, the 30 students in Law 395: Celebrated American Trials of the 20th Century, convened in Room 205 of Rider University's Fine Arts Building to discuss the infamous Lindbergh kidnapping case of 1935 and, albeit unintentionally, the concept of heroes in their lives.
The undue influence that Charles Lindbergh, the blond icon who in 1927 made the first solo flight across the Atlantic, exercised on the investigation, ransom negotiations, and trial of the alleged kidnapper, illegal immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann, is legendary. Time Magazine called Lindbergh "the [20th] century's first hero" who "unwittingly pioneered the age of mass media celebrity." H.L. Mencken called the Hauptmann trial "the biggest story since the Resurrection."
To put the trial into contemporary perspective, I asked my students to list a present-day hero, a hero of the past, a current villain, and the worst villain in all history. I then started our discussion with the fundamental query, "What is a hero?"
Their answers — and lack thereof — were a bit of a surprise. There was no clear consensus on who their heroes are or ought to be.
What is a Hero?
My students' responses fell into two camps. Roughly half the class subscribed to what I'll call the subjective view: A hero is anyone that I personally look up to as a role model. The other half took an objective approach: A hero must be someone who has acted courageously, perhaps in the face of great personal suffering, sacrifice, or risk. I then turned our talk to whom they had listed as living persons meeting their criteria.
Five of my 30 students listed no one — no living person lived up to their definition of hero. An equal number voted for their parents; four listed "Mom" and one named "Dad." Additionally, four others who cast their ballots close to home listed a Rider professor, a local family court judge, a neighborhood minister, and "my husband."
The other named heroes spanned the spectrum: former GE chairman and CEO Jack Welch and musician Michael Jackson; Secretary of State Colin Powell and author Kurt Vonnegut; actor Robin Williams and astronaut Neil Armstrong. Next to "Mom," the only other person to garner more than a single vote was former-president Jimmy Carter, who has a pair of admirers in Law 395.
The votes for historical heroes were just as scattered: first ladies Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, and Pat Nixon; musician John Lennon and industrialist Henry Ford; union organizer Cesar Chavez and feminist Jane Addams; Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, and Dr. Jack Kavorkian, the euthanasia advocate; Mother Theresa and Jesus Christ. Four students named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (While my mini-poll was anonymous, I should note that the class includes four African-American students.) Only one student didn't name any historical hero.
The quartet of votes for the great civil rights leader notwithstanding, my small sample of American college students of the new century suggests that our campuses share no clear consensus about who our heroes are or ought to be.
What is a Villain?
By contrast, they had no difficulty listing their favorite villains. Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein topped the list of worst living villain. Bin Laden garnered 12 nominations, Saddam received six, and the generic "terrorists" brought the "War on Terrorism" total to 19 out of 30.
The consensus on "worst historical villain" was even more striking. Adolph Hitler won in a landslide, losing only four votes to rivals Al Capone, Malcolm X, "the serpent," and "society" at large.
What can one conclude from this admittedly modest, unscientific sample? The following Friday our campus newspaper, Rider News, coincidentally offered me some additional clues. One of several student-columnists had penned a piece headlined "Real Life Superheroes: The Hero Within." The budding columnist commented, "The problem with today's society is that we just don't have enough people trying to be heroes anymore." The column exhorts its student-readers to "just realize that superheroes aren't fictional characters for children, but exist in everyday life as normal, everyday people, performing deeds out of the goodness of their hearts because they want to see the world become a better place . . . one cat out of a tree at a time."
Another opinion piece in the same issue complained about "Apathy. The word seems harmless, no doubt, but within those three syllables lie the destruction of ideals, the dashing of dreams, and the absolute corruption of passion. . . . Its infectious nature spreads like wildfire as participation and interest are consumed by the overwhelming desire to do nothing." To leave the cats up in the trees, I suppose. That columnist urged his classmates to be better students, to take advantage of their educational opportunities, and to participate more in class.
Perspectives on the Good and the Bad
Admittedly anecdotal, the first conclusion I offer is that while our students believe they know what's bad, they are harder pressed to identify "the good." History seems to send them no clear signals about who and what is best in our common human heritage, except, I suspect, that African Americans overwhelmingly still cherish the largely untarnished image of MLK.
A curious coincidence concerning Hitler is that the young Lindbergh — the putative protagonist in our "celebrated trial" of the evening — admired the German chancellor, calling him a "great man" and accepting a Swastika-emblazoned medal from the dictator. In 1941, Lindbergh made a speech in which he castigated "the British, the Roosevelt Administration, and the Jews" for advocating American entry into World War II. Is it any wonder, then, that students can identify the villain but can't quite make out the hero in this slice of American history?
Informed Opinions
The problem is not that these students are poorly informed. Quite the contrary. In the words of one who could name no living hero, "We see all the flaws with TV, etc."
Nor is the problem that they are cynics who don't want heroes. One of the "no opinion" participants in my little poll had written in a name and reason why, then carefully scribbled over both, rendering them absolutely unreadable. A healthy minority of others named a parent or spouse who "is there for me," "would risk his life for me," "is always selfless," or "has been more than just a mother." Very few flaws on these folks!
Similarly, Rider's two cub-columnists encouraged their readers to act heroically in small, day-to-day things and to approach their college careers with energy and enthusiasm. In identifying Bin Laden and Saddam, college students may be thinking globally. But if my modest inquiry is correct, they are — by and large — looking and acting locally for their fair share of heroism.
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AFGHANISTAN: HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
James Ottavio Castagnera
Sep. 30, 2009
The generals are demanding more troops and the president appears prepared to oblige. For a sixty-something American male, this sounds ominously like Vietnam, Westmoreland, and LBJ. For historians versed in Afghanistan’s bloody modern history, the echoes sound louder and deeper.
Britain fought three Afghan wars in the 19th and early 20th centuries, all aimed primarily at halting hostile expansions southward toward Imperial India.
The first Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842) was highlighted by the massacre of a British army. Occupying Kabul, but surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, 4500 military personnel and some 12,000 camp followers departed the city under a supposed promise of safe passage on January 1, 1842. Struggling through a frozen landscape and constantly harassed by hostile tribesmen, the entire contingent was either wiped out or enslaved with the sole exception of Dr. William Brydon, an assistant surgeon of the British East India Company.
The Brits rallied its forces, replaced incompetent commanders and returned to Afghanistan, cutting a swath of destruction all the way back to Kabul. They then, wisely returned home to India. In the succeeding years the Russian creep toward the gem in Victoria’s crown continued largely unabated by Britain’s Afghan efforts.
The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80) was precipitated by the arrival of Russian envoys in Kabul. When a British demand for similar diplomatic recognition went unanswered, the Brits again sent occupying forces into Afghanistan. With the empire’s troops occupying most key locations in the country, the Afghan ruler was forced to sign a treaty. However, on September 3, 1879, the British diplomatic resident in Kabul was assassinated. Back trudged the troops over the high passes, occupying Kabul yet again and forcing the abdication of the Afghan ruler. Although this had the appearance of a victory, arguably wiping away the humiliations of 1842, the Brits realized that holding the city did nothing to control the hostile tribes outside its walls.
In 1880, the British government changed and the incumbent Liberals abandoned the so-called Forward Policy. Britain once again left Afghans to their own devices. Meanwhile, an estimated 2500 British and colonial troops and some 1500 Afghan fighters had died in this second confrontation.
The Third Anglo-Afghan War lasted a mere three months, commencing in May 1919 and ending in an armistice on August 8th. The brief clash was precipitated by an Afghan incursion into British territory. This was repulsed but the two forces fought to a standstill. Some Afghan cities, including Kabul, were bombed. The Afghan army pulled back and the armistice was signed. No clear winner emerged from the brief struggle, but British territory was cleared of Afghan troops. Thus, for all practical purposes, ended British military adventures in Afghanistan. Three armed conflicts across 80 years resulted in nothing more than the maintenance of a fragile status quo on the empire’s northwestern frontier.
Fast forward to 1979. Deployment of the late-great Soviet Union’s 40th Army into Afghanistan on Christmas Eve began the nine-year agony that finally ended with a Russian withdrawal commencing on May 15, 1988. Anyone who has read George Crile’s splendid book, Charlie Wilson’s War (2003), knows that the CIA played an important role in enabling the Afghan freedom fighters to bring down Soviet helicopters as a rate that emasculated the Russians of battlefield mobility and left their armor and other superior ordinance to the tender mercies of the mujahideen. Chopper losses totaled 333, along with another 118 aircraft of various types downed. Tank casualties totaled 147. The Soviet Union admitted to the loss of 13,836 troops. Other observers place the figure closer to 14,500. More than 600,000 Russian troops served in Afghanistan (though no more than 100,000 at any given time), during this doomed adventure.
Concludes Crile, “The story of (Congressman) Charlie Wilson and the CIA’s secret war in Afghanistan is an important, missing chapter of our recent past…. [T]he terrible truth is that the group of sleeping lions that the United States aroused may well have inspired an entire generation of militant young Muslims to believe that the moment is theirs.”
And, now, here we are, entering our ninth year in Afghanistan, having launched Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001. And our commanders are singing the same old song sung by William Westmoreland in the sixties: just give me more troops and I’ll bring home a victory.
We all know George Santayana’s famous statement: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Sad to say, while we all give that pearl of wisdom frequent lip service, we cannot seem to follow it, once the boots are on the ground.
(Jim Castagnera is a university attorney and author of Al Qaeda Goes to College [Praeger 2009].)
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PLAYING THE GREAT GAME IN CENTRAL ASIA
Jim Castagnera
Aug. 26, 2008
The Russians have romped through Georgia. When taken to task, they asked rhetorically, if Uncle Sam can invade Baghdad, why can’t the Bear invade Tbilisi. Secretary of State Rice retorted that this was not Czechoslovakia in 1968. With all due respect, Dr. Rice drew the wrong analogy. Cold War thinking isn’t helpful here.
To find an accurate historical analogy to today’s situation, she would do better to hark back to 1885. For decades British India and Tsarist Russia had been playing a chess game in Central Asia. The Russians had designs on a vast region, which they considered a natural part of their sphere of influence. Victorian Brits feared that Russian aspirations extended beyond the Caucasus and the Steppes. In their minds, India, the jewel in their queen’s crown, was the ultimate stake in the game.
Early in the game, Britain tried to control Afghanistan as a buffer to perceived Russian lust for the Indian subcontinent. The first Anglo-Afghan War (`1838-42) ended in an English disaster. From a column of some 16,000 British troops retreating out of Kabul, only one survivor emerged to tell the grizzly tale. The Brits later took their revenge, razing Kabul. The second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-81) was a win for the Lion.
Four years later, the Empire was ill prepared to counter Russian incursions in Central Asia. In 1884 General Sir Peter Lumsden, a member of the Joint Afghan Boundary Commission formed by the two “super-powers,” warned that the Russian Bear was stirring in the region once more. Then, in January 1885, came the news from a relief force sent south along the Nile from Egypt that Khartoum, capital of the Sudan, had fallen to a self-proclaimed Islamic Mahdi. Worse, the British icon, General Charles “Chinese” Gordon, who had organized the defense of Khartoum, had been killed. Although the British, who effectively ruled Egypt, had planned to abandon the Sudan in the face of the fanatical Islamic forces, Gordon’s death left them honor-bound to avenge him. Lumsden’s warning, that the Russians would be on the move “as soon as a large portion of our forces are locked up in Egypt and the Sudan,” proved itself prophetic.
The Russians seized some additional Central Asian territory, the British issued diplomatic warnings and marshaled troops along India’s northern border, and in the words of historian Peter Hopkirk, “the tremors of the crisis were being felt throughout the rest of the world.” He adds, “In America, where the news had rocked Wall Street, all talk was of the coming struggle between the two imperial giants.” However, no repeat of the 1854-56 Crimean War occurred.
In his 1992 book, The Great Game, Hopkirk --- a London Times reporter who traveled extensively in Central Asia --- referred to the 1979-89 Russian debacle in Afghanistan, when he introduced his account of the 19th century: “If [my] narrative tells us nothing else, it at least shows that not much has changed in the last hundred years. The storming of embassies by frenzied mobs, the murder of diplomats, and the dispatch of warships to the Persian Gulf --- all these were only too familiar to our Victorian forebears. Indeed, the headlines of today are often indistinguishable from those of a century or more ago.”
Now, some 20 years after the Soviet Bear departed Afghanistan, tail between its legs, we are hearing the same echoes reverberate down the long corridors of history from those distant days when Great Britain --- our only staunch ally today in Afghanistan and Iraq --- fought a sometimes-cold, occasionally-hot, war for control of the vast land of the “Stans.” As in 1885, and in 1979-89, Western and Russian forces will not clash directly with one another. Rather, we will work to outmaneuver the Bear. Russo-Ursus will work just as hard to regain its earlier influence in those oil-rich lands, which broke free in 1989-1990, when the USSR crumbled like the Berlin Wall. The Great Game will go on, the 21st century continuing the patterns of geopolitical power struggle that characterized Central Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries.
[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University. He is writing his 14th book, about terrorism’s impact on higher education, for Praeger.]
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HOW TO END THE WAR ON TERROR
James Ottavio Castagnera
Dec. 05, 2008
During this past year, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about our so-called War on Terror. On the plus side --- and this is no small thing --- the continental United States has not been attacked since September 11, 2001. On the down side, reports coming out of Afghanistan in the last couple of months indicate that the Taliban is resurgent. According to one Taliban leader, quoted October 30th in “Rolling Stone,” the Russians were fiercer than we Americans, and they turned tail after nearly ten years of trying to subdue that wild land.
Iraq remains deadly, despite the Surge. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars have enriched war profiteers, such as Cheney’s Halliburton, while failing to either rebuild or pacify the country. And, as I write this, terrorists are shooting it out with commandos inside Mumbai, India’s luxury hotels. Pakistan is more than likely implicated in these events, as it is also the Taliban’s refuge along that nation’s northwest border with Afghanistan. So much for Uncle Sam’s efforts to bring peace and democracy to west and south Asia.
So what, if anything, should the U.S. do during the next eight years or so? My research and reading suggest to me four fundamental steps toward a safer America.
First, let’s take Al Qaeda at its word. Its leaders have been saying for decades that their main goal is to get the West out of the Middle East. Bin Laden and company don’t approve of our lifestyle and culture. But that’s not why they attack us. Their aims are limited and clearly stated. The likelihood that the U.S. will establish vibrant democracies in places like Afghanistan and Iraq approaches zero. Our democratic system has evolved over hundreds of years. How can anyone be so naïve as to think it can be transplanted in wildly different political/religious/cultural soil and be expected to bloom in a matter of months or even a few years? I say, leave Islam alone.
Second, we need to do what President Jimmy Carter should have done during the 1970s, instead of spewing energy-saving tips, wrapped in his Mr. Rogers sweater. We need to wean ourselves away from dependence on foreign oil. This means finding and pumping our own petroleum where it’s still available; building dozens of new nuclear power plants; embarking on a crash program of alternative energy research and development. Such a national mission might also do a lot to refuel our sputtering economy, while vastly increasing our national security.
Third, we need to spend less on international military adventures and a whole lot more on homeland security. The fences being constructed along our southern border are a good start. Once that stretch of porous real estate is secure, we ought to look north. We often revel in maintaining the longest unguarded national boundary in the world. Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate that boast. Illegal immigration must be halted and illegal immigrants removed from our midst.
At the same time, the American workforce must better prepared to compete in the global marketplace. When we are through congratulating ourselves on electing our first black president, let’s recall that inner-city high school graduation rates still hover at or below 50% in most major metropolises. Colleges are over-priced and inefficiently labor-intensive. We are cranking out too many lawyers and too few engineers and scientists.
These four steps are neither easy nor quick fixes. But, I believe, they are the only solutions likely to work in the long run. An old French general, late of French Indochina in the 1960s and retired to the south of France, is said to have told his estate manager to plant several species of Southeast Asian trees. Considering the general’s age, the manager replied, “But, sir, such trees will take many years to grow and blossom.” Replied the old warrior without a blink, “Then we should begin immediately.”
We Yanks have been bred on thirty-second sound bites and fourteen-day diets. Our business leaders think in terms of quarterly earnings. Our military is trained for shock-and-awe, short-term conflicts. None of this instant gratification is serving our needs very well. It’s time to tackle the tougher, long-term solutions that can really work.
[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia lawyer and journalist. His 17th book, “Al Qaeda Goes to College,” will be published by Praeger in the spring.]
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Here's what some others have written about him over the past decade or so:
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