I’m testifying today before the House Armed Services Committee about Al Qaeda and U.S. policy. My complete testimony follows.

Chairman Skelton, and members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify about Al Qaeda’s evolving strengths and weaknesses and what implications they might hold for American policy.

Al Qaeda’s elasticity and adaptability have long challenged those who seek to define, analyze, contain or defeat the group. Analytically, the first problem is one of taxonomy. Some of the politicized debate about counterterrorism policy in the United States can be traced to persistent confusion about what Al Qaeda actually is, and therefore, what character of threat it presents at a given time. On one end of this foggy spectrum have been a series of maximalist arguments that sometimes equate the Al Qaeda threat with the existential nuclear threats of the Cold War and argue for recognition of a forthcoming, multi-decade conflict between religious civilizations. On the other end of the spectrum are arguments holding that Al Qaeda’s dangers have been vastly overstated and that the best way to contain its potential may simply be to ignore its leadership and propaganda until they both whither away. Embedded in these unresolved arguments is an additional confusion about whether Al Qaeda is best understood as a centralized organization; a network of like-minded organizations; or merely an Internet-enabled ideology.

An accurate assessment of Al Qaeda must begin with the recognition that it has become several things at once: An organization, a network, a movement or ideology, and a global brand. Its strengths and weakness across these distinct characteristics vary.

First, although not necessarily foremost, Al Qaeda is a specific organization with a specific history, now more than twenty-one years old, one that has involved the same two leaders—its amir, Osama Bin Laden, and its deputy amir, Ayman Al-Zawahiri—serving without interruption. The notes and principles from its founding meetings in the summer of 1988 are part of the public record. Al Qaeda the organization has never been tested by a succession crisis because its two foundational leaders have remained at large for so long. Its use of leadership or management committees with policy and functional responsibilities such as military operations, finance and media has also been continuous.

Long before 9/11, however, Al Qaeda also deliberately aspired to act as a vanguard and inspirational resource for like-minded violent jihadi organizations across the Islamic world. First in Khartoum, more informally, and later in Afghanistan, more formally, Al Qaeda’s leaders attempted to construct common goals and methodologies for like-minded groups from Southeast Asia to North Africa. The fortunes and connectivity of this intentionally constructed network have continually changed as the fortunes of particular groups have risen or fallen, and as Al Qaeda’s ability to operate across international borders grew more constrained after 9/11.

So I was riding down the Delhi-Jaipur highway the other day and stopped at a tourist dhaba for a soft drink so that our driver could rest a bit after dodging monster trucks for several hours. Hovering outside, near the parking lot, I looked up and saw, walking by, my New Yorker colleague Lawrence Wright, author of “The Looming Tower.” Astute readers will be able to assess the probabilities: 1) It’s a very, very small world; or 2) Some sort of winter boondoggle conference or literary festival must be in the vicinity.

It is in fact the brainchild of another New Yorker contributor, William Dalrymple: The Jaipur Literature Festival, now in its fifth year. It was staged on the grounds of the Diggi Palace and the venues ranged from a ribbon-decked lawn to an ornate Durbar Hall to the unfortunately named Merrill Lynch Mughal Tent. (I’m all for corporate sponsorship of cultural events, but this was perhaps not an ideal brand position: Investment bank equals ruling maharajahs.) Anyway, one is sheepish about even admitting one’s presence at such a warm and happy place in the midst of other people’s winters, but it should be recorded that a good time was had by all, and that many names familiar to readers of this magazine (either as writers or subjects) were present: Tina Brown, Roddy Doyle, Isabel Hilton (scheduled; not sure if she turned up), Alexander McCall Smith, Asma Jehangir, Hanif Kureishi, Niall Ferguson, Anne Applebaum, and Wole Soyinka, to name some. It was hard with so much going on to listen to everyone but I did catch Roddy Doyle, who was charming and illuminating about his work and Ireland.

Winter fog forced many who planned to fly down to the Rajasthan desert to take the highway instead - one of the most notorious roads in India, and particularly overloaded these days because the fog has disrupted air and rail freight. There are, fortunately, many sights to distract from the Mad Max-inspired competitions among drivers. For example, it is now apparently the practice of the Rajasthani police to sell billboard space on the metal barriers used to erect blockades or divert trucks into inspection lanes. I saw painted onto blue police barricades ads for a college, a technical school, and Asian Colour ISPAT Ltd., apparently a paint company. Hard to imagine that this is an authorized revenue scheme for the police, but perhaps this is why the Indian economy is growing at about seven percent this year. Also, in this land of astrologers and luck charms, we saw one that I had never noticed before, strung across the cab of a painted truck:

Yes, those would be eggplants.

In addition to their colorful illustrations, India’s trucks are covered in stenciled phrases that serve as a kind of scat commentary on the road’s improvisational swerving. One of the most ubiquitous, and my traditional favorite, captured the week’s mood: Blow horn; use dipper at night.

Anniversary assessments of Presidential performance often seem to reveal more about the emotional attitudes of the assessors than they do about the subject itself. Disappointment, satisfaction, optimism, and pessimism abound—a lively spectrum of brain chemistry, to be sure, and often entertaining to absorb.

There have been a few recent Presidencies that were defined in year one. By this time in George H. W. Bush’s Presidency, for example, the Berlin Wall had fallen. By this time in George W. Bush’s Presidency, 9/11 had arrived and the Taliban had gone, sort of. Perhaps the economic crisis that Barack Obama inherited will turn out to be so protracted and severe that it will later seem to be an event equally as controlling of his priorities; let’s hope not. Otherwise, it seems that the Obama Presidency is still defining itself.

What would an Executive Summary of Obama’s electoral promises sound like? He said that he would reset America’s relations with the world. He said that he would do everything in the government’s power to arrest the economy’s free fall. He said that he would focus on Afghanistan and responsibly pull out of Iraq. He said that he would deliver on the health-insurance-reform bargain that had been quietly negotiated over a period of years. (In this bargain, even before Obama’s election, the private insurance industry had more or less agreed to stop discriminating against its customers on the basis of their health conditions, if Congress would agree to guarantee a larger pool of covered individuals—if not universal coverage, something much closer to it.) In addition, Obama said he would remake federal energy and education policy. Finally, he promised to do something that a lot of outsider-style Presidential candidates pledged to do: change the ways of Washington.

Read more on Obama's first year.

Journalism is not a particularly esteemed profession, but its capacity to bear witness remains one of its more redeeming attributes. At moments like this in Haiti, a journalist’s function as a witness can be relatively uncomplicated, in comparison to, say, the processes of political or investigative reporting. In the field during a natural disaster of this scale, you do feel at times ghoulish and intrusive upon both the grief of survivors and in relation to the more directly useful efforts of rescuers and humanitarian relief workers. And yet all of those classes of participants in the crisis will recognize, most of the time, that journalism helpfully amplifies their own condition or potential.

I learned something about journalism while covering my first earthquake, in northwest Iran, in June, 1990. Tens of thousands of people died. After some travail, a small group of us newspaper and broadcast correspondents from the West arrived by helicopter, after dark, in a flattened village. I was still pretty green but I had seen enough death and devastation by then to know that it would not affect me emotionally. Nonetheless, as I stumbled into the village off the helicopter, I felt paralyzed, professionally. There were no houses or buildings left standing; there were so many dead; there was so much audible suffering. What was one supposed to write in one’s notebook to capture and convey this scene?

My memory of what followed is vivid. I was in the company of one of those lions of foreign correspondence at the Los Angeles Times—I think it was Rone Tempest. Perhaps he noticed that I seemed confused. Anyway, he said—grunted, actually—like some veteran baseball player spitting tobacco in a nineteen-thirties movie: “Make lists—all the little things.” And so I did. A tin cooking pot with rice still in it. Five boots, none matching. A bicycle wheel protruding from a pile of rocks. Like that. We rode back to Tehran that night on a bus. I wrote my story on one of those ancient Radio Shack portables. When I flipped through my notebook with a flashlight, I gradually came to realize that I had something particular—and for American audiences so distanced from revolutionary Iran—something useful to say.

Upon repetition, covering earthquakes gradually became less pure. The reason is that as a newspaper correspondent, at least, one became schooled in the editor-feeding subgenres of earthquake coverage. These subgenre stories passed like months on a calendar across the twelve days that generally constitutes the entire attention span of editors, broadcast producers, and their audiences. Subgenre pearls which one can anticipate from Haiti but about which one should perhaps not be overly cynical include: The Late Miracle, approximately on day five, in which an improbable survivor is dug out by heroic search teams from a foreign country; The Interpretation of Meaning, a story to be filed on Sundays in Christian cultures and Fridays in Muslim ones, chronicling the efforts of religious leaders to explain God’s will in this instance (I recall sitting, riveted, on a press platform in Tehran, listening to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani deliver a remarkable Friday sermon about science and Allah); and Heading to the Exits, in which the laundry-less journalist forecasts a slow recovery complicated by political fallout and imperfect relief efforts, while implying that he/she will return over the ensuing months to chronicle the full course of the recovery.

For now, however, I tune in and read about Haiti with an appetite for small, humanizing detail that gradually accumulates in a crisis of this magnitude, ensuring that it will not be neglected—or, later, forgotten. Already there is much outstanding journalism on the airwaves and in print —notwithstanding, in these times, the considerable expense. Technology, increasingly, makes us all witnesses to crises. And yet, only those journalists intrepid enough to find their way forward, independently, can focus our lenses.

Afghans seem to be more optimistic about Obama’s policy toward their country than Americans are. Since their decisions will be more decisive than ours in the outcome, that has to be counted as a good thing.

I spent a couple of days this week at Arizona State University, a hotbed of science involving emerging technologies and sustainability. Among the scientists I met was James Elser, a biologist who runs the School of Life Sciences. We chatted about space and the origins of life for a while, and then he handed me a two-page white paper that addresses his current obsession: phosphorous. We’re wasting it and need to figure out soon how to recycle it, lest famine or worse ensues, he said. Phosphorous, Elser told me, “is the biggest problem you’ve never heard of.”

P, as it is known on the periodic table, is a nutrient essential to plant and animal life. Unlike nitrogen and oxygen, however, it is not copiously available from the atmosphere. It’s in the Earth and it’s finite. How finite, nobody knows—unlike fossil fuels, governments don’t keep careful track of supply and demand, he said. This information gap, at the least, is perverse. From Elser’s white paper: “Plants, and indeed all living things, depend on P for the construction and turnover of DNA, RNA, ATP, and cell membranes. Failing sufficient P, plants, animals and humans die. The key concept: P is unsubstitutable in agriculture and in human life.”

As Elser put it as we talked, this issue “only matters if you want your grandchildren to have bones.”

Phosphorous consumption is increasing because of its use in fertilizer. Almost all of the world’s mined phosphate rock lies in five countries—China, Morocco, the United States, Jordan, and South Africa. At projected rates of consumption, there might be enough to last a century, or perhaps only for two more decades.

There are potential solutions involving the recycling of agricultural, animal, and human waste. Price signals as scarcity arrives will probably lead to market-driven recycling. But a price-driven response will also likely be bumpy and play havoc with global food supply. Some sort of price signaling may already have started: in 2008, fertilizer prices spiked about seven hundred per cent, touching off a global food crisis. Compared to, say, climate or peak oil or terrorism, Elser’s case that this is a relatively neglected issue implicating the human condition seems pretty convincing.

Since the failed bombing attempt against Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas, the Obama Administration’s public rhetoric has slid from its immortal opening error—“the system worked”—back toward the American mainstream of signaling toward terrorists. Since the Reagan Administration, this has generally involved public resolve and threats of retaliation, to reassure Americans that their government is on the case and to warn terrorists that they inevitably will face death or capture if they plot against the United States. On Saturday, Obama spoke to Americans and presumably also to Al Qaeda recruits in Yemen when he threatened, “All those involved in the attempted act of terrorism on Christmas must know: You too will be held to account.”

The language caught my ear because over the holiday break I have been reading an excellent academic study of American strategic communication toward Al Qaeda, “U.S. Counter-Terrorism Strategy and al-Qaeda: Signaling and the Terrorist World-View,” by Joshua Alexander Geltzer, who is now a law student at Yale, after earning a doctoral degree in war studies at King’s College, London, under the tutelage of James Gow, one of the better academic security analysts of his generation. Warning: The book is very expensive; probably best for those who can charge it to the office somehow.

The purpose of Geltzer’s study is to analyze American communication with Al Qaeda, by deed and word, particularly since 9/11, and to explore the degree to which American signaling to terrorists has been self-conscious; what the hypotheses behind this communication strategy seem to be; how the strategy has conceptualized the intended terrorist audience; and, of course, whether it has been effective. (I don’t think I’m giving away the ending by reporting that the author’s conclusion is … um, no.)

Geltzer not only reviewed the public record—speeches by Presidents Clinton and Bush, and by other key actors such as former Vice-President Cheney—but he also conducted a number of on-the-record interviews with intelligence officials and counterterrorism policymakers from both the Clinton and Bush Administrations. Among other things, he has produced a fascinating and chilling thread of narrative history of the Iraq war’s casus belli. He documents richly the consensus among Bush Administration decision-makers, outside of a few realists such as Richard Armitage, that among other purposes, it was necessary to invade Iraq in order to send a general deterrent signal to all terrorists in the Middle East. Geltzer quotes Henry Kissinger’s rationale for advising Bush to carry out the Iraq invasion: “We had to go in there … to make clear that challenging the United States had disastrous consequences…. Afghanistan was not enough to make that point.”