Book review – If It Takes a Thousand Years: From Al-Qaeda to Hamas, How the Jihadists Think & How to Defeat Them

In the movie Cool Hand Luke, the Captain utters the famous line, “Some men, you just can’t reach”. When it comes to the Middle East and Israel, for most people, you simply can’t reach them. They don’t get it. From the United Nations to the US State Department, misinformation and prejudice preclude them from understanding the situation.

A person who genuinely understands the situation is former US Army Captain Jesse Petrilla. He’s a US Army veteran who has come face to face with Islamic terrorists, spoken with them, and engaged with them. Here, he astutely articulates what is going on in relation to radical Islamic terrorism.

Often attributed to Albert Einstein, the observation that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result” is undoubtedly true. A very recent example is former President Biden, who erroneously felt that a cease-fire with Hamas would bring a permanent end to war. Biden, like most of those in the Department of State, does not truly understand Israel’s enemies.

In 1972, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the impact of the Paris riots of May 1968. He replied, “Too early to say.” It was widely reported that the question was about the French Revolution of 1789, which had occurred nearly 200 years before. But over the last half-century, his reply to a question that was not asked took on a life of its own.

The fact is that China does take a long view of history. Their approach to the future is not in 4-year election cycles but rather hundreds of years in the future. That was articulately detailed  in The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury. He writes how China has a formal and detailed strategy to top the United States as a global superpower by 2050.

Another group that has taken a long view of history is jihadists. In If It Takes a Thousand Years: From Al-Qaeda to Hamas, How the Jihadists Think & How to Defeat Them (Bombardier Books), Jesse Petrilla has written a fascinating, albeit horrifying, exposition of how jihadists operate and their long-term game plan.

The title of the book comes from an interrogation of a terrorist by  Petrilla in Afghanistan. He asked him how long the jihadists intended to fight. The Taliban commander replied, “If it takes a thousand years.”

Petrilla has a deep and broad understanding of how Islamic terror operates. He’s a former US Army captain, and the book includes insights from interviews he conducted with captured Taliban and Al-Qa’eda fighters in Afghanistan.

While he knows quite well how the Jihadists think, that has for the longest time not been the case with those in the US State Department and Department of Defense. These departments have long approached terrorist groups with a Western mindset.

The words thousand years in the title are not hyperbole. As Petrilla makes it eminently clear, jihadis live in a very different world of time than those in the West.

That is one of the misconceptions that cause US leaders to misunderstand their enemies completely. To the tune of trillions of dollars spent on losing battles with tens of thousands of lives lost. Those misunderstandings, which Petrilla articulates, have devastating effects on those who have to live with the results of jihadi terror. To which US politicians don’t have to live with.

After spending several horrifying chapters laying out the jihadi threat, Petrilla provides many suggestions on how the US can go about countering the threat. Part of the problem is that the enemies of the US, who feel democracy is an anathema to their worldview, use democratic tools to further their goals.

Many of his suggestions require bold steps, which the Biden, Obama, and other administrations were incapable of taking. Not only was the Biden administration oblivious to the threat, but it also supported many enemies of the US.

This book is a wake-up call for those who think that organizations such as Hamas and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham can be negotiated with. Petrilla writes not from the ivory towers of academia but as someone who has spent significant time face-to-face with these terrorists.

This is a unique, eye-opening book from a writer who truly and intimately understands the subject. The future is not so bright unless books like this are on the Department of State’s reading list. And while the jihadis are willing to wait a thousand years, not only do they not have a concept of time, but they may also be significantly overstating the time it takes for them to reach their goals.