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Hello and welcome to the law fair podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes. Today's

episode marks the first in a series of interviews that Wittic is saying is

recording with people who have non-legal expertise in areas of interest to

law fair readers. The basic idea is that a great many of the questions with which

national security law struggles involve factual issues that implicate a diverse

group of non-legal fields from regional specialties to technical ones and that

we should hear more from such people. Wittic's first guest in this project is

Brookings Senior Fellow Bruce Raidel, one of the country's leading experts on

al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups in the AFPAC region. Bruce, who had a long

career in the CIA and ran the Obama administration's re-evaluation of Afghanistan

strategy at the outset of the administration, sat down with Wittic for a wide

ranging discussion of the state of al-Qaeda, its affiliated groups, and the

complicated relationship between the United States, the Taliban, and the

Pakistanis. Bruce, thanks so much for joining me today. Let's start by

talking about al-Qaeda core. I would love your thoughts on how you define al-Qaeda

core and in terms of its objectives, first of all. I like to refer to it as al-Qaeda

al-Hon or mother al-Qaeda because I think that that's al-Qaeda core is an

American term. Al-Qaeda al-Hon is an al-Qaeda term. I think it more accurately

...