Free Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter L. Bergen Page A

farming; its top-down CEO; the salaries it paid many of its members; the comprehensive training it provided its recruits; and the detailed application forms that were required to attend its training camps.The group’s bylaws, which ran to thirty-two pages in an English translation, covered annual budgets, salaries, medical benefits, policies for al-Qaeda members with disabilities, grounds for dismissal from the group, and vacation allowances.
    Al-Qaeda’s leaders were the type of micromanagers familiar toanyone who has toiled in the office of a large organization. Mohammed Atef, the group’s military commander, once fired off a memo to a subordinate, complaining, “I was very upset with what you did. I obtained 75,000 rupees for your family’s trip to Egypt. I learned that you did not submit the voucher to the accountant, and that you made reservations for 40,000 rupees and kept the remainder.” In a similar vein, Ayman al-Zawahiri chastised members of al-Qaeda in Yemen who hadsplurged on an expensive fax machine. For an organization devoted to revolutionary holy war, the pre-9/11 al-Qaeda sometimes had the feel of an insurance company, albeit a heavily armed one.
    This bureaucratic structure was demolished by bin Laden’s foolhardy decision to attack the United States. In June 2002 an al-Qaeda member wrotea letter to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the operational commander of 9/11, admonishing him, “Stop rushing into action and consider all the fatal and successive disasters that have afflicted us during a period of no more than six months.” The writer complained that bin Laden ignored any advice that didn’t fit with his view that attacking the United States had been a master stroke: “If someone opposes him, he immediately puts forward another person to render an opinion in his support.” Bin Laden, the writer continued, didn’t understand what had befallen al-Qaeda since the 9/11 attacks, and kept pushing for action by KSM; meanwhile, jihadist groups in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe had all suffered tremendous losses. The writer urged KSM to halt completely any further terrorist attacks “until we sit down and consider the disaster we caused.”
    This internal critique of bin Laden was substantially amplified in public two years later, whenAbu Musab al-Suri published on the Internet a fifteen-hundred-page history of the jihadist movement. Suri was a deeply serious Syrian intellectual who had known bin Ladensince the 1980s—perhaps the most thoughtful strategist of bin Laden’s inner circle. He had spent much of the 1990s living in Spain and later in London, where he wrote for obscure militant jihadist publications. In the year before 9/11 Suri had run his own training camp in Afghanistan, where he advocated a flatter, more networked structure for al-Qaeda, rather than the hierarchical structure then in force.
    In hiding after the fall of the Taliban, and knowing that he was likely to be arrested at some point (as he eventually was, in Pakistan in 2005), Suri spent much of his time on the run, writing his massive history of the jihadist movement. It recounts the devastation that al-Qaeda and allied groups suffered following 9/11: “We are passing through the most difficult of circumstances and are living the climax of affliction.… The Americans have eliminated the majority of the armed jihadist movement’s leadership, infrastructure, supporters, and friends.”Suri wrote that common estimates that three thousand to four thousand militant jihadists had been killed or captured since 9/11 were actually on the low side.
    He concluded: “America destroyed the Islamic Emirate [of the Taliban] in Afghanistan, which had become the refuge for the mujahideen. They killed hundreds of mujahideen who defended the Emirate. Then America captured more than six hundred Jihadists from different Arab countries and Pakistan and jailed them. The Jihad movement rose to glory in the 1960s, and continued through