SpyTalk

"No one will be able to get all the jihadis," he added. "They will always evolve into something else,"  like the permutations of the Ku Klux Klan in America

But it is important to eliminate Bin Laden, he said, because the terrorist kingpin is an "icon."

Turki, a 1968 graduate of Georgetown University, had known Bin Laden, son of a Saudi construction magnate, for decades before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. 

In the 1980s Turki is said to have personally recruited Bin Laden to join U.S.-backed Muslim fundamentalists fighting the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan.

Now head of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Turki first made his remarks during an off the record discussion at a conference at New York University's campus in Florence, Italy, on May 21. 

But he but repeated them in a SpyTalk interview last week. 

The conference was sparked by lively debates over the importance of Bin Laden to al Qaeda, with some experts arguing that he had become irrelevant in an organization that, in any case, had lost its capacity to deliver a mortal blow to the United States.

But Turki said al Qaeda was still powerful and Bin Laden still its biggest draw.

"There would have been no Mohammed Atta without Osama Bin Laden," he said, referring to the leader of the Sept. 11 attacks. "His star power draws more militant activists" to terrorism.

"Bin Laden has become an icon," Turki added in a seperate interview with NPR's Sylvia Poggioli.  

"So if he is eliminated there will be no more something to look up to. And the issue of a martyr, that some people say is there, is less attractive than having someone living and doing things and surviving the efforts to eliminate him."

Turki disparaged prospects for a military solution in Afghanistan, telling SpyTalk,  "You're not going to fix Afghanistan with U.S .and NATO forces."

The negative consequences of Predator drone attacks, which have been blamed for the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, outweigh their benefits, he argued.

A better tactic for killing Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri would be "special operations based on good intelligence," Turki said.

 

"We need a multinational, comprehensive counterterrorism intelligence center involving all countries," he added. "Pooling all the intelligence in one place ... is the best way to get at these people."

"The Kingdom would welcome" a diplomatic solution to the Afghanistan war, he added. Saudi Arabia would be happy to host -- "but not mediate" -- peace talks between the U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai and the Taliban. 

Postwar multilateral aid to Afghanistan could come from many donors, which "might even include Iran," he said.

He also said Saudi Arabia would like to see all of its citizens detained in Guantanamo "go back home," where they would be enrolled in the kingdom's controversial rehabilitation program.  

Only 11 out of 570 former al Qaeda followers put through the program "have gone back to their bad ways," he claimed.