From a March 27, 2007 lecture at the U of T's Munk Centre by Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11:

"I've often noticed that after my talks, people are depressed. So I just want to leave you a few thoughts about how al Qaeda can't win and so we shouldn't delude ourselves and make the enemy larger than it really is."

"There are three reasons al Qaeda can't win.

1. "Everyone is an enemy. When American and coalition troops went into Afghanistan after 9/11, they picked up in one of their training camps a list of enemies. Number one on the list of enemies was heretics, the Mubarks of the world. 2. Shiites. 3. Israel. 4. America.

"Well, that's a lot of enemies for one little organization to have. Now, according to Abu Musab al-Surri, one of their chief strategists, the list also includes Jews, Westerners in general, members of the NATO alliance, Russia, China, atheists, pagans and hypocrites. I hope I didn't offend anybody in this room.

"But you see how categorical it is. There's really no one that they can make alliance with. They are alone, even in the Muslim world."

2. "Most victims of al Qaeda are Muslims." He estimated that al Qaeda has killed many more than twice the number of Iraqi Muslims than people who died on 9/11. "And if you look at the attacks that have taken place since 9/11 in Istanbul, Casablanca, Bali, Karachi, Jakarta, Riyadh -- these are Muslim countries. Al Qaeda mainly attacks Muslims, and Muslims know that.

"It will never become the dominant force in Islam because Muslims know they will be the first to suffer under al Qaeda rule."

3. "The final reason al Qaeda won't win is because it offers nothing to the people who follow it.

"Al Qaeda has no politics. We have tons and tons of pages of internal al Qaeda documents, and you can access them on the Internet. Many of them have been translated into English.  They're called the Harmony Documents."

He compared the al Qaeda Constitution to that a "Ladies Garden Club" in its detail about committees, qualifications, term limits and whatnot.

"But not a single page of al Qaeda's politics."

If Osama bin Laden were giving the lecture and you asked about his economic model or environmental policy, "he's never thought of any of those things. Al Qaeda doesn't believe in politics, because it doesn't believe in the future. It's not a political movement. It doesn't have a vision, It's more like an (instinct?), a snakebite.

"It does offer one thing to the young men who join it, and that is death."

He recalled an conversation with a Pakistani journalist who came across a group of Arabs in Afghanistan staying out in the open in white tents during the time of the Soviet conflict. He told them the Soviets would spot them and wipe them out. Their response? "But we came to die."

"That is the soil in which al Qaeda was planted. We think of al Qaeda as a terror organization, but for the young men who join it, it's really a suicide machine. Their own cultures offer them ... very few options to be powerful in the world. Al Qaeda offers them a chance to make history. All they have to do is die."

I found the podcast at this Odeon page, but first heard it broadcast on CBC's Ideas on Sept. 28, 2007. The segment above starts at about the 40:30 mark of the podcast.

Here's a YouTube video of a similar lecture Wright gave at Princeton University in 2007.