Mansoor Ijaz
Chairman, The Crescent Partnerships and Fox News Analyst
"Transnational Terrorism: Can We Be Safe Again?"
March 6, 2003

Mansoor Ijaz: I am one of those who has always been what I refer to as an advocate of constructive engagement. Finding a way no matter what your philosophy, radical ideology, which way you thought…always trying to find a way to connect and bring someone back from the brink of having lost the rationality of what we as human beings are all about.

But there are some human beings that are beyond repair. Some minds become so diseased that you can’t fix them. And so it then becomes dependent on the rational world to ensure that the rest of us are not put at risk. We are a god-fearing nation. But we are also a nation that is built on a system of justice, rules, and laws. We live in a society where anyone, no matter what they believe or don’t believe, still has a right to live in a society where the rules and the laws protect our individual freedoms. But when a man stands up on a given day and says god told me that I can invade Kuwait, and rape and pillage and plunder their wealth, then you have to wonder what would a man like that do with weapons of mass destruction in his hands. And now transferring those weapons of mass destruction into the hands of even more radical minds, more virile threats that we will face in the coming years and decades ahead.

So, as we try to define and craft a topic for this morning’s gathering, the most important thing that I thought that we should really try to get into is what is the nature of this new threat in the post September 11^th environment that we face, what is it about, who are these people, what drives their ideology to be what it is, and how do we then counter that threat…what can we do and can we in fact survive that.

So as I define what that threat is and you know, when you talk about transnational threats, we have had transnational threats before. But we have never had a transnational threat that had cataclysmic proportions to it. And that is the real point that I want everyone to understand. Al Queda is no longer an organization. It is no longer about just men maybe even some women, children that are set on destroying the civilized world. Al Queda has now become a phenomenon. It is a virus. It is like a nerve gas that is infecting radical groups all over the world. Even radical groups that have no affiliation, belief in or association with Islam as a religion. Or with Middle Eastern genealogies as a background. Even those groups are now participating in Al Queda. And by the way the strongest indication of that are in Latin America where Al Queda has sleeper cells very deeply rooted in the radical ideologies of certain groups down there.

So the first thing that we have to understand is that it is a cataclysmic type of threat. It is one that can in fact destroy everybody sitting in this room. And so we can’t ignore it. That is number one.

Number two is that the people who purvey this threat, the people who are the originators of this threat they are ideologically driven. This is not terrorism for ransom. This is terrorism for the sake of…in the case of the bin Laden ideology, forcing Islam down the throat of every single person living and breathing on the face of the planet. And I say this as a Muslim. As an American first and as a person who believes in the Islamic faith, that these people are hell bent on in the final days…in the Koran, it is promised that in the final days of the earth, that all people will become Muslim. So bin Laden has decided it is time to speed the clock up on that.

Now, I presume from the faces that I see here in this room, most of you are either Christian or maybe some Muslims or people from the Indian Sub Continent. But I can tell you that this radical ideology is one that cannot be compromised with. It cannot be negotiated with anymore. And you cannot change the way that these people feel because they are desperately seeking only one end. To do some harm to us on their way to meet their maker and achieve whatever they believe their heaven is going to be. They cannot in fact wait to get out of this life. That is what people need to understand.

And then thirdly, this is a threat that is rooted in an intellectual and ideological base that is highly intelligent. Dr. Iman Zahieri who is bin Laden’s number two man…most of you probably know he is a physician…he is a pediatrician by training. But as Iman Zahieri who did the calculations on exactly where you needed to hit the World Trade Centers to be able to bring them down. It is Iman Zahieri who insured that the pilots knew that the wings should go into the air…into the building at such an angle to ensure that the full extent of the fuel and the fuel tanks of the wings would explode throughout the building as it went in. And others like him with that kind of intelligence, with that kind of capability, with what we saw today on television where we have now seen clear evidence of how Saddam Hussein’s machinery of war has been able to hide itself from the weapon’s inspectors. You have to think to yourself what else can they do. And I say this to you in not just the halls of a great university with the intellectual capacity in this room we can probably solve half the world’s problems. If we really wanted to. But, I say this to you as people who have to understand that there is good and there is evil. But that doesn’t mean that evil was stupid. And that is something that we cannot underestimate. We cannot underestimate the magnitude of their intellects or the depth and capability of their intelligence.

Now, how serious and how specific is this threat? And there I just want to give you a couple of examples because it is such a deep subject matter that we could spend the entire hour on that. But let me give you a couple examples of the way that we worry about in the business of protecting the United States and it’s allies. What do we really worry about?

Sixty-seven percent of the United State’s economy which is now something approaching ten trillion dollars per annum in GDP and if there is an economist in the room please don’t correct my numbers because I am not sure of what they are. But, it is about ten trillion dollars. Sixty-seven percent of that…. almost seven trillion dollars of our economic growth is generated by the service economy…people going out and shopping in malls, going to a movie theatre on the weekend, you know, spending money to just live our lives in the free way that we choose to live. And it is that economic…soft economic underbelly not the infrastructure of the United States that these people seek to destroy.

Simple example, and I will answer the question if somebody asks it, why do they not do this? And I will tell you what the answer is. But think about this for a moment. Seven or eight shopping malls around the United States…the biggest ones that we have…and just seven or eight radicalized minds walk into the entrances of those malls from seven or eight different entrances simultaneously. And it more or less the same time on a given day they all just blow themselves up. You don’t need a weapon of mass destruction. Remember airplanes were not considered weapons of mass destruction or their fuel tanks. You don’t need biological or chemical weapons strapped to your body, you just have to blow yourself up. I don’t know how many mothers we have in this room…how many fathers we have in this room. But I do not at this moment allow my wife to go into a large shopping mall anymore because there is a real danger something like that could happen.

Now, why is that something that they don’t do and why is it that is the kind of target that they choose. It is because of the disruption to our way of life. And ultimately the disintegration but first the disruption is what they seek. For five days last year in 2001, after September 11^th, the entire United States Senate was shut down because of an Anthrax letter. I say this advisedly…only five people…five important lives but only five people died from Anthrax but look at the disruption that it caused in our entire society. Look at the disruption to our airline industry, to the travel industry, to the hospitality industry. They seek to destroy the way in which we live. And we cannot allow them to have the tools to be able to do that.

Now, many people here worry at a structural level the Homeland Security Department, Governor Tom Ridge…Secretary Tom Ridge worries about protecting our national infrastructure. Al Queda’s thinking process is not one in which they worry about striking the most difficult target. We in fact, the United States of America, still present the most difficult target that they have got. We are two oceans apart from everybody else. We have more or less a benign neighbor to the north and more or less a benign neighbor to the south. We are still relatively speaking, even though they have hit us here now, still relatively speaking insulated.

But let me give you an example of what would be an equally catastrophic event. And I see some people in this room that look like they are from the Indian Sub Continent so this will be particularly poignant to you. There are fourteen civilian nuclear reactors in India today. Eleven of them do not meet the minimum requirements of the international atomic energy agency in terms of radiation leakage and seepage and things like that. They are already unsecure, unstable nuclear facilities. But can you imagine that if Al Queda were to rent a small aircraft and fill it with C-4 explosives and just kamikaze pilot into the center of one of those nuclear reactors…what would happen? Now, loss of life wherever it occurs on planet earth is a devastating consequence. We saw two hundred people die…people who the Al Queda leaders thought were Americans…they turned out to be Australians in a discothèque in Bali. They seek destruction wherever they can get their hands on it. But they want the softest, easiest targets. Because terrorism is about hitting and then causing the widest ripple effect that you possibly can. It is not about simply destroying the masses and masses of people that you can do in one shot.

Now, the question then is that if these are the threats, if this is the nature, if this is how specific it can be, how do we protect ourselves, can we protect ourselves? I would suggest to you that is a very complex answer and I am not sure the answer is yes yet. But I can tell you that there is only one or two countries in the world that have the technological ability…what goes on in the halls of this university’s labs, in the laboratories, in the research centers, in the scientific and technological development centers around this country, that is ultimately what is going to protect us from this threat because it is ideologically driven therefore you cannot negotiate with them. We could give all of Israel back to the Palestinians tomorrow. We could give all of Kashmir to the Muhajadeen fighters that resist against the Indian government tomorrow. We could give all of Chechnya to Muslims. And it wouldn’t change one thing. It would not change the way in which they seek to destroy us because that is not what they want to destroy. They want to destroy our way of life.

We have here, they have here. They are not happy to come up here. That is what the American dream is all about. I am a living embodiment of what that American dream is all about. What they want to do is bring us down here. And if you leave this room with no other picture in your mind, just remember what I said. We are here. They are here. They do not want to come up. They want to bring us down. It is as simple as that. It is not more complicated than that.

Now, I personally and leading an effort through my equity investment firm in New York to develop what I refer to as the pan-ultimate national security technologies. We are building the most advanced scanners that will be deployed at every airport and seaport within the next two years in this country. They use very sophisticated patented technologies to essentially create CAT scans of every single piece of baggage or container from a cargo ship that will come into this country from now on to detect nuclear, chemical and biological agents. To detect that we got this component of anthrax and this component in a different bag of anthrax. That is that maybe they didn’t mix the anthrax in one place. Maybe they didn’t mix the chemical weapon in one place but they put the components in different cargo units and then they sent them in. We will even be able to detect to that extent exactly what is going on. It will take a couple of years and we are very vulnerable during that period of time. And the race is can we seal ourselves technologically before they are able to increase the how should I call it, the role call of their followers. Before they are able to take a much larger segment of that middle moderate Muslim voice and have more of them fall off into the radical sea. That is the race and that is why we have not a minute to lose in disarming the people that have the capability to do that already and at the same time ensuring that we have got the technological ability to protect ourselves.

We are also developing the most advanced internet security paradigm so that god forbid if they were to attack our shopping malls or our movie theatres at least the average men…working men and women in this country who have no idea why Al Queda hates us so much will still be able to get their food and their basic necessities of life if we have to, over the internet.

Building fire walls doesn’t work anymore because I can tell you that their evil genius is such that they know computers just as well as we do. Some of the brightest minds of the world…brightest computer minds in the world are working for Al Queda not against them. So we have to find ways to protect our computer infrastructure, to protect our national infrastructure. That is the best way to do it. And we are developing that technology as well.

These are just a couple of examples to give you an idea that hope is not lost. In fact, hope is quite large. It is the American technological ingenuity that will enable us to go out and protect ourselves from these people.

Now, we also have to understand that this is a asymmetric threat and what I mean by that is that they choose to attack us in ways that we never thought about defending ourselves against. Because they figured us out. They figured out how we operate. They have been living here for years and years and years. And slowly transmitting information back. And now, though we blew up their base of operations in Afghanistan, what do they do? You may not know that today but bin Laden now gives his instructions in the form of human chains. Iman Zahieri travels from point A to point B not on private jets. He travels on the bottom cargo holds of tankers…oil tankers…cargo ships. It takes them two weeks, three weeks to get from point A to point B. But they are patient and they are very calibrated about the way in which they go about this. This is not a one-year exercise or a one-month exercise or a two-year exercise for that. This is a twenty/thirty/forty year plan. Does everyone in this room know that the average age of an Al Queda adherent and I am talking about no matter which group they belong to, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islam Jihad, these Argentinean radical groups, the IRA…it doesn’t matter which one they are but the average age of an Al Queda adherent is in the early thirties, late twenties. Can you imagine that we have to deal with these people when we are…when they are in their forties and their fifties and they have inculcated their own children all the way down the road. So we have no choice but to deal with this asymmetric threat by sharing our technological capabilities…our ability to see and protect ourselves first. To prove that we can do it ourselves. To share that with our friends, with our allies, around the world to ensure that they have the capacity to protect the threat from ever getting out from wherever it might reside somewhere else before it gets to us. And I speak selfishly as an American in that sense because America has always led the world in technological development…always. And we have no choice but to maintain that lead to preserve the infrastructure that gives us that capacity. Whether you are an Indian or a Pakistani or an Algerian or an Irishman or an Italian, it doesn’t make any difference. We all come together on the platform of being Americans first. And everyone that walks out of this room has to understand that they have a moral responsibility not just to their fellow Americans but to the rest of the world to ensure that we build that capability so that everyone else can protect themselves before the threat ever gets to us again.

Now the final point I would like to make on the issue of the nature of our response. And this may come to some of you as where did that come from. But, follow my point for a minute. In many parts of the Islamic world the mother is the center of the family as badly treated as women are in most parts of the Islamic world, women are still the centerpieces of the family. And it is the lack of education for women that in my judgment causes the diseased minds of their young sons and nephews and uncles and brothers and fathers to become what they are. We have to change that trend. We have to take that lead in making sure that our aid when it goes out…our foreign aid when it goes out is not just aimed at protecting national security…it is not just aimed at protecting global security but it is at a root level aimed at changing the way in which people’s minds function. I grew up in this country…I was born and raised in this country and I had a mother who taught me the value of what it meant to be an American first because she understood what those freedoms were. She understood what the Constitution meant. And by the way, I’ll tell you, as a Muslim, if you read the Constitution and you read the Koran the right way, there isn’t much difference.

As a Muslim I tell you the Constitution of the United States is one of the most Islamic documents that was ever written by human beings. And yet we have allowed the debate to be ramrodded by radical minds. That is one of the reasons that I choose to speak out so forcefully. That is one of the reasons that as a person whose political views are more left than right, I choose to speak out more often on programs that are more right than left in the public domain to ensure that people understand that there is in fact another way to look at this. But when you talk about national security, when you talk about protecting Americans, that is not about liberals or conservatives…it is not about Democrats or Republicans, it is not about political views. It is about a fundamental way of our living versus the way they want to change the way that we live.

Finally, I just want to make one point about the issue of how we share intelligence. And the reason that is so important is because we have the most formidable intelligence capability in the world technologically speaking. But we are grossly deficient when it comes to human intelligence. We have lost the capacity as one intelligence official put it to me a few months back when I was traveling incognito in the Islamic world with a long beard in traditional garb so that nobody would recognize who I was just to listen to the scuttlebutt in the mosques and understand what was really going on on the ground…how serious the problem really is. How many of our intelligence officials would be willing to live in bin Laden’s cave for six or seven months or eight months at a time and eat food that would make you sick every night. I give you my own example when I was making…when I was working on the blue print for peace in Kashmir…I visited some senior Kashmiri leaders in Srinagar. And the night that I came home from a dinner for almost seven hours I was in my bathroom with you know, dysentery. And I tell you that example because I thought they had tried to poison me. But it was actually just bad food. Nothing more.

And the point I am trying to make to you is that we in the civilized world are not prepared to live in the conditions that these people are willing to tolerate to destroy us. That by itself, that very fact by itself should tell you what this problem is all about. How desperate they really are to bring us down.

I wrote this in an op-ed piece in 1996. Not in 2001, not in 2002. In 1996. If we do not change the way we deal with the Islamic World they…and we do not help those that are disaffected, they will rise up to tear us down. So I say to you that we must develop human intelligence. We must be willing to go out and understand what these places are all about, what these people are all about, what drives the motivations. We must educate them. We must put our aid…our foreign aid dollars into the right places, not the wrong places. We must share our intellectual capacities to protect technologically not just the United States but other places as well to ensure that the threats don’t encroach on us, we have to help build up the rest of the world. The monolith that is the United States of America can not survive if people increasingly lay down at the base layer and ultimately topple the entire column over on it’s self.

Thank you very much for your kind attention. (applause)