Middle East expert speaks at MU

The lecture was for the Mizzou Reads program.

By Kara Henderson

Published Sept. 4, 2009

Jesse Auditorium was peppered with students and adults Tuesday, all waiting to hear from Peter Bergen, the first man to ever hold a television interview with Osama bin Laden.

After his famous interview, Bergen went on to publish several books that reached the New York Times Best Seller List, including "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden" and "The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader." Since their publication there have also been documentaries based upon these novels, one of which was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2002.

Although the lecture was directed toward students in the Mizzou Reads program, who were assigned to read Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns," the information presented in the lecture was aimed at all students and the general public.

Department of Student Activities Chairman Nick Lang worked with the Mizzou Reads program to coordinate the event.

"He has an outlook on the war that very few are able to hear from the mainstream media through his personal work," Lang said.

Bergen went beyond discussion of the book and focused largely upon the past, present and future of Afghanistan, as well as the United States' role in the country. He gave his audience a brief overview of the Soviet Union's occupation, Afghanistan's own civil war and the Taliban takeover.

Bergen also spoke on the realities of the situation in Afghanistan.

"A lot of things are going wrong, there's no doubt about it," he said.

Crime has risen without the presence of the Taliban, which would chop an Afghani's hand off if they were caught stealing, Bergen said. Suicide attacks have also risen sharply and August was the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers in the war in Afghanistan so far. Even more concerning, Bergen said the war is moving into Pakistan, where Al-Qaeda is headquartered. Drug trafficking is also a major problem in the nation: 93 percent of the world's heroin originates there.

Bergen said despite his rather dismal portrayal of Afghanistan's situation, he has reason to see signs of hope for the future. First, the U.S. has the support of the United Nations (unlike in the Iraq War). Also, Bergen said, the Taliban today is not a countrywide movement. Although many Afghanis did enjoy the security provided by the Taliban, they did not support the ways security was obtained. Bergen said democracy might also be in Afghanistan's future: in the recent elections, they boasted a 70 percent voter turnout rate, something even the U.S. hasn't had since the 1900s.

"Afghanis are really hoping for us to succeed," Bergen said. "They are looking to us to fulfill our promises."

He said the U.S. also has a few goals in mind, some of which include replacing poppy production with food crop production, reducing the Taliban presence in Kabul and making the Kabul-Kandahar Highway drivable and secure.

After Bergen's lecture, many in attendance formed long lines to ask him more detailed questions. When asked what improvement in Afghanistan would look like, Bergen said it might actually resemble some of the beginning scenes of "A Thousand Splendid Suns," in which the nation was at peace with their neighbors and was relatively stable.

One student in attendance, freshman Dennis Barrett, said he learned more about the subject by the end of the night than he expected he would.

"I never fully understood the depth of political instability in Afghanistan," he said. "This really opened my eyes to the real state of things."