“The 9/11 attacks forced the United States to intervene directly in Afghanistan’s civil war on the side of the Northern Alliance. This is precisely what bin Laden wanted: to re-create the struggle he had fought against the Soviet Union in the same place and with the same result, the enemy ground down in a quagmire, but now with the United States as the adversary. This was, bin Laden’s son later confirmed [in an interview with Rolling Stone on February 4, 2010], ‘my father’s dream…to bring the Americans to Afghanistan. He would do the same thing he did to the Russians.’ Bin Laden and [al Qaeda second-in-command] Ayman Zawahiri have often gloated over their success in tricking the Americans into Afghanistan.”
– Bruce Riedel, Deadly Embrace, Page 80