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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Can Europe Teach U.S. Something About Engaging Islam?; The Chechen Connection; Interview with Eric Schmidt

Aired April 28, 2013 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: This is GPS, the Global Public Square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria.

Today, we'll ask how to handle terrorism post-Boston. I'll start with both the Former Director of the CIA and the National Security Agency, Michael Hayden, how to stop the lone, self-radicalized terrorist.

Next, we'll take you halfway around the world to Chechnya to delve into the Chechen connection.

Then, how does someone get radicalized? I'll ask Mira Nair, the director of a terrific and timely new movie, "The Reluctant Fundamentalist."

And we'll talk to Google's Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, about technology and terrorism as well as other things.

Finally, why the world can't get enough of Ben Franklin, I'll explain.

But, first, here's my take. As we learn more about the brothers Tsarnaev, we want to ask larger questions about radical Islam, Russian immigrants, Muslim communities and the breakdown of assimilation. What do they tell us about all this?

The most accurate answer might turn out to be not much. Larger phenomena might be at work, but these two young men might not reflect any rise or intensification of these trends. It seems they are just two alienated young men who turned towards hate and then, allegedly, to murder.

That was the point the brothers' uncle Ruslan Tsarni made when he pointedly called his nephews "losers." He was arguing against the notion that the boys represented a larger community or larger trends.

Tsarni and his family, after all, were part of the same Chechen migration to the U.S. and they are well-adjusted, law-abiding and thoroughly American.

Since 9/11, foreign-inspired terrorism has claimed about two dozen lives in the United States. During that same period, more than 100,000 people have been killed in gun homicides and more than 400,000 in motor-vehicle accidents in America.

One crucial reason the number of terrorism deaths is low is that America does not have large pools of alienated immigrants. Polls repeatedly have shown, for example, that Muslim immigrants to the United States embrace core American values. American assimilation continues to function well.

Now, could it do better? Well, there's one surprising place that the U.S. could learn something from, Europe. I know, I know, assimilate has worked better in the United States than there, but let's acknowledge that European countries are dealing with a much larger problem.

Muslims make up 5 percent of the population in Germany, 7.5 percent in France, compared with 0.8 percent in the United States, according to Pew calculations.

Jonathan Laurence of Boston College, who has done extensive research on Muslim communities in Europe, found that before 1990 European countries were largely indifferent towards their Muslim populations letting foreign embassies like Saudi Arabia set up the mosques and meeting centers for these groups.

They realized that this produced a radicalized and unassimilated migrant community. So, now, in recent years, governments at all levels have engaged are engaging with Muslim communities, taking steps to include Muslims in mainstream society but also to nurture a modern, European version of Islam.

It's worth noting, Islamic terrorism has declined in Europe in recent years.

The lesson from Europe appears to be engage with Muslim communities. That's a conclusion U.S. law enforcement agencies would confirm. The better the relationship with local Muslim groups, the more likely those groups are to provide useful information about potential jihadis.

A recent attack in Canada, apparently inspired but also perhaps directed by al-Qaeda, was foiled for just this reason. An imam in Toronto noticed one of his congregants was behaving strangely. He reported the behavior to the police, who followed up and arrested the man before he could execute his plan.

Before briefing reporters on their collaboration, Canada's top counterterrorism official invited Toronto's Islamic leaders to a meeting and thanked them for their help. "But for the Muslim community's intervention, we may not have had the success," said the official, according to one lawyer who was at the meeting.

In the wake of Boston, the smartest move we could do would be greater outreach to these communities so that the next time someone begins to act strangely, community leaders would pick up the phone and call their friends at the police.

For more on this, you can read by column in the Washington Post. Go to our website, cnn.com/fareed, for a link. And let's get started.

So is it possible to stop self-radicalized terrorists who are here in America legally? Joining me now, a man who should know, Michael Hayden led both the CIA and the NSA, the National Security Agency. Welcome back to the show.

MICHAEL HAYDEN, FORMER DIRECTOR, CIA AND NSA: Thanks, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: So, watching Boston ...

HAYDEN: Right.

ZAKARIA: What did you think? You look at these guys and there's no particular track record ...

HAYDEN: Right.

ZAKARIA: There was one trip. Maybe they had radical views ...

HAYDEN: Right.

ZAKARIA: But had never done anything violent.

HAYDEN: Which is a fairly large club.

ZAKARIA: Which is a fairly large club. So is there some system? Should we be thinking of a way we can stop this in the future?

HAYDEN: Here's what I choose to think about it, Fareed. If you look at this attack, look at any attack, particularly looking in the rearview mirror as opposed to looking through the windscreen, you can judge that it could have been prevented; this was preventable if.

Let me also offer you the view that attacks of this nature are inevitable. This is like penalty kicks in soccer, all right? No matter how good the goalie is, sooner or later this balls going into the back of the net.

And I don't mean to be so dark for your viewers, but they have to understand that we're working in a part of the spectrum now that is well below what we experienced more than a decade ago. I mean, look, what happened in Boston was a tragedy, truly a tragedy, but it wasn't a catastrophe.

And if we force our enemies to work in that band where, from the outside looking in, it's hard to tell whether this was a high-end crime or a low-end terrorist event, that's a measure of our success preventing our enemies from doing that which they want to do; a mass casualty attack against the iconic target.

ZAKARIA: But, suppose you have a few of these people and they get radicalized on the Internet and they learn how to make this stuff through Inspire magazine or other...

HAYDEN: Right.

ZAKARIA: There's lots of information on the Internet outside of al Qaeda sites.

HAYDEN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: Is there something you could do? You ran the National Security Agency ...

HAYDEN: Sure, yes.

ZAKARIA: You can eavesdrop on conversations.

HAYDEN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: What could you do?

HAYDEN: Look, there are probably things you could do on the margin that reduce the odds of this a bit, but I've taken to describing our efforts out here like this and they're good enough now that those things that used to really frighten us, 9/11, World Trade Center I, airliners over the Atlantic, very, very unlikely.

Now, what have you got? You've got Boston. You've got Little Rock. You've got Najibullah Zazi trying to come here to New York. And now the question I ask the American public as an intelligence officer, "So what do you want me to do with my arm?"

I mean, I can push it down a bit. I can buy you marginally more safety, but at what cost? At what cost in your privacy? At what cost in your comfort, what cost in your convenience, at what cost in your commerce?

I mean these are all very serious questions and the folks inside the American intelligence community will respond to the republic. They'll do what you tell them to do.

But, as a citizen, my judgment is that's about where we want it to be. If you push this down much further, we do what I've said we haven't done to date, which is we begin to change our DNA as a free people.

Now, Fareed, the dark side of that is, as I said before, this is penalty kicks. This is going to happen. It's a level of risk that I've very disappointed to say we're probably going to have live with.

ZAKARIA: When you look at the situation of the older brother going to Chechnya or Dagestan, the Russian intelligence tipping us off, was there anything there that should have been done differently?

HAYDEN: You know, you look back and even those of us who are sympathetic to hard a problem this is, will say, "I wonder if," and "Could we have done that?"

But let me give you a couple of factors, all right? How many tips do you get in a week? And the answer is you get an awful lot. And now this one came, apparently, from the FSB, from the Russian Service. Now, Fareed, as you well know, the Russians are (inaudible) of a bunch of Chechens. Not all of them are terrorists and not many of them are dangerous to the United States. So you've got that factor.

And, then, the travel to Dagestan probably wasn't the alerting thing to us that it would have been had he gone to Waziristan.

ZAKARIA: Right.

HAYDEN: Where threats to the United States have been generated.

So we'll probably change our checklist. We'll probably add a few questions to those FBI interviews, but I'm -- look, we'll let the facts take us where they will, but I'm a little reluctant to just vastly criticize the bureau or anyone else on this yet.

ZAKARIA: When you look at the Boston, what they were able to do, do you worry that with a little more skill, with a little more planning, it could have been much worse or ...

HAYDEN: Yes. No, I do. I mean I'm not going to sit here and give tips to future terrorists bombers as to how they could have acted differently, but if they were better in their trade craft, this could have been a lot worse.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that in order to do something big, you need to be able to track the money -- you know, in other words, what makes you feel this stays below a certain ...

HAYDEN: Because the attacks up here really are complicated. They're slow-moving, there are lots of threads. You've got to move people and things. You've got to get money. You've got to pass instructions.

And, Fareed, right now American intelligence is so much flooding that zone that we're pretty much grabbing most of those threads. And you start one or another thread and pretty soon you've got the fur ball of the plot.

ZAKARIA: Do you worry the way that many politicians have that the surviving terrorist was read his Miranda rights, is going through a criminal process?

HAYDEN: The criminal process, I'm indifferent on. I really am. I'm an intelligence officer and he's not eligible for military commissions, but I know we debate military commissions in Article 3 courts ad nauseam. I don't care.

I'm interested in the information. I want to question him in the most effective way so that I'll learn about this event and any other future events or perhaps any other plotters with whom they were connected.

I was surprised that he was Mirandized so quickly, particularly given what the administration had said. And, apparently based up on press reports, the people doing the interrogation were surprised as well.

You had the HIG, the high-value interrogation group, which was formed at the beginning of the administration, to do this very kind of thing and as they're going through with him talking fairly freely, a judge, assistant U.S. attorney come in and read him his Miranda rights and now he's stop talking.

Look, I'm not a lawyer, but I have to tell from the outside looking in, I don't understand that.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that when you think about this going forward, is there something we should be doing in terms of, you know, vetting visas Because, again, you get into this problem of the risk reward ...

HAYDEN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: Where you shut down a lot of stuff to do it. But, again, there have been cries about that. Do you think there's some effective way to do anything?

HAYDEN: Look, there are three-quarters of a million people - names in the TIDE's database.

(LAUGHTER)

ZAKARIA: (inaudible) TIDE database.

HAYDEN: That's kind of the person of interest file for counterterrorism here in the United States. You going to feel better if we got in a million in there?

In fact, all right, prior to the Christmas Day bombing in 2009, the complaint, my old community was fielding almost on a daily basis is, "Why are you interfering so much with commerce and travel? You have too many people on the no-fly list." And, then, all of the sudden, after the event, "You should put more people on the no-fly list."

Well, I mean, there's a balance here and the immediate reaction after any event like Boston is, "You should have done more." But, you know, coolly thinking about this, there are serious trade-offs involved here in terms of we did all this for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

You got to keep those things in balance all the time and to go too far in one direction, inevitably is at the expense of the other virtues.

ZAKARIA: Michael Hayden, pleasure to have you on.

HAYDEN: Thanks, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Up next, the Boston bombers' connection to Chechnya. What is it and what does it mean? I have two great experts. Right back. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: The Chechen connection. The Tsarnaev brothers, the alleged Boston bombers are ethnic Chechens, Muslims whose homeland is in the caucuses.

Chechnya and the region as a whole has a bloodied and troubled history that dates back hundreds of years. What can we learn about the suspects by understanding their homeland?

I have two terrific guests to talk about it: Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, also a columnist for the Washington Post, and Anatol Lieven is a professor in the War Studies Department at King's College London.

Both have spent considerable time studying and thinking about the region and its people. Thank you, both, for joining.

ANNE APPLEBAUM, COLUMINIST, WASHINGTON POST: Thanks.

ZAKARIA: Anne, let me start with you. When people talk about Chechnya, there's often a reference to radical Islam, violent Islam, militant Islam, but it wasn't always like that.

And really the dominating factor about Chechnya, as far as I can tell, is that for hundreds of years these people have been trying to get free of the Russians, right? I mean the Chechen struggle for independence goes back at least to the middle of the 19th century.

APPLEBAUM: Yes. Tolstoy actually wrote some of his most famous stories about the Chechen wars -- the Chechen wars of the 19th century. Probably for Chechens alive today, the most significant and most traumatic historical memory is that of the deportation of the Chechens.

During the war, Stalin decided that they were all traitors and all of them, the entire nation, men, women and children were deported. They were taken out of their homes in Chechnya, you know, from one day to the next and sent to different parts of central Asia.

That experience of deportation, of losing their homeland left many very embittered. They were allowed to return home only in the 1950s.

ZAKARIA: And, Anatol, you reported brilliantly for the Times of London on the Chechen wars.

So after the Soviet Union breaks down, the Chechens, once again, as they had several times over the last few hundred years, tried to break free and tried to declare their independence. The Russian army comes in.

What are the estimates, as best you can tell, of how many Chechens the Russia army killed over the last 25 years?

ANATOL LIEVEN, PROFESSOR, KING'S COLLEGE LONDON: Well, if you include Russian soldiers and Chechen fighters, then somewhere in the region of 100,000 would be a realistic estimate.

ZAKARIA: And when you were watching this, did you find that the struggle -- the Chechen struggle for independence started out as essentially a nationalist struggle, but, as the Russians killed more and more Chechen civilians, as the region got plunged into war, it became more radicalized and it became more Islamized or was the element always very strong?

LIEVEN: Well, I think what happened in Chechnya was -- that resembled in many ways what has happened in other part of the world which is that a struggle for independence that began as an ethnic one was colonized by, if you like, international Islamist forces.

And, as in Afghanistan before and in other places, they brought with them both their radical Wahhabi theology, but also wider agendas that went far beyond Chechnya.

And the leader of the international Islamists in Chechnya and a good many of his men have fought previously as Arab volunteers with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan so as part of the same movement that bin Laden was part of so that element is there.

ZAKARIA: Anne, what is the nature of these societies? Are they now highly Islamicized? Are they highly religious?

APPLEBAUM: Well, historically, as Anatol correctly said, they are not traditionally highly Islamicized and they -- you know, they aren't accustomed to living in -- it's not a Saudi Arabia or even Afghan-style society. Women didn't traditionally cover themselves.

And you still don't see that now. You see elements of it and you see parts of the partisan movement may be like that and so on. But -- although most people in those regions would be Muslims, you -- it would be actually fairly unusual to find most people very radical or very Islamized. Even when you see photographs from there, you don't see that at all.

ZAKARIA: Finally, Anne, in your Washington Post column, you pointed out that the Tsarnaev brothers seem a lot more like the London bombers, people who had come to Western society, somehow didn't fit in, and then lashed out.

Would do you think is the lesson you draw from that? What can we do?

APPLEBAUM: The London bombers and the Madrid bombers and a number of other European terrorism cases have involved people often second generation or even third generation immigrants who, for whatever reason, didn't fit in, weren't happy, didn't feel successful, it could be for many possible reasons, and returned home, as the elder Tsarnaev brother seems to have done, and somehow reconnected with their homelands which maybe they didn't even remember and were radicalized by that experience and brought some element of that radicalism back to Europe.

The Europeans have tried to deal with this by finding better ways to deal with this by finding better ways to deal with and to integrate Muslims.

And we've never had this problem in the United States, at least not on a large number -- not on a large scale number -- on a large scale sense.

But the idea that you can radicalize yourself by returning to your homeland and becoming anti-Western or anti-American, we have seen that pattern before and it would be useful to look at what European countries have done to deal with it.

ZAKARIA: Anne Applebaum, Anatol Lieven, thank you so much.

LIEVEN: Thanks a lot.

ZAKARIA: Up next, What in the World. As emerging markets rise, you might be forgiven for thinking poverty is declining across the world. But we actually did the math and the answers are not encouraging. I'll explain.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Now, for our What in the World segment. Watching countries from around the world grow and prosper, we tend to assume that global poverty is falling.

And, in fact, the World Bank says that in 1981 nearly half the world's citizens were impoverished; that is they lived on less than $1.25 day. And, today, less than a fifth of the world's population lives in poverty. In raw numbers that translates to a 40 percent drop from about 2 billion to 1.2 billion people.

But when I dug deeper, I realized that the picture is more murky. Put simply, most of the reduction in global poverty has to do with one country, China. Take it out of the equation and the numbers look very different.

Let's go back to 1981. Back then, China accounted for 43 percent of the world's poor. The other major contributors were South Asia with 29 percent and Sub-Saharan Africa with 11 percent.

Fast forward just a decade and you'll see that China's share of the world's poor began to drop. The trend continues through the 2000s. By 2010, China accounted for only 13 percent of the world's impoverished population, South Asia's share had jumped to 42 percent, Sub-Saharan Africa's tripled to 34 percent.

The World Bank data shows that the total number of impoverished Chinese declined by nearly 680 million people in the last three decades. That's about 95 percent of the total global decline.

By registering double-digit growth for three decades, Beijing has transformed the fortunes of a poor nation within a generation. That's amazing, but it tells you in the rest of the world, progress has been much much slower if there's been progress at all.

There's a lesson here for other developing countries. Take India, for example, New Delhi has also made strides against poverty. The problem is those strides have only been a few steps ahead of population growth.

Look at the numbers. In 1981, 429 million Indians lived in poverty, about 60 percent of the population. By 2012, the percentage of impoverished people had dropped to 33 percent and yet the total number of Indians living in poverty as still around 400 million.

Why? You see, India's population had expanded by about half a billion. For all the millions who were lifted out of poverty, millions of others were bone into it.

What is the answer? Growth. In the 1960s and 70s, India was infamously stuck in a rut of slow growth with a mediocre 2 percent a year often. Then, in the 1980s it began opening up and in the 1990s New Delhi scrapped much of the old socialist set of controls.

By the mid-2000s, India was growing at around 9 percent. That growth helped create India's middle class and dramatically reduced the number of people living in poverty.

But according to the pro-free market Cato Institute, if those reforms had taken place two decades earlier, India would today have fewer impoverished people, 175 million fewer.

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ZAKARIA: That's why India's recent drop in economic growth is alarming. Those most affected will be the poor.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA (voice-over): Africa is also changing, but for its poorest, change is still too slow. Look at this graph.

Since 1981, poverty rates have been dropping steadily in both the developing world and the world as a whole; but in sub-Saharan Africa poverty rates actually got slightly worse in the 1980s and '90s. It has only recently begun to turn the corner, again, thanks in large part to faster economic growth.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Global poverty is falling. But China deserves most of the credit. And thanks to the Communist Party of China, we now know that the path to poverty alleviation is capitalist-led growth.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA (voice-over): Up next, how technology can detect terrorists and defeat repressive regimes. Google executive chairman, back from North Korea and Myanmar, joins me.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN HOST: I'm Candy Crowley in Washington with a check of the headlines.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CROWLEY (voice-over): In Boston today, 28 people remain in area hospitals following the marathon bombings that also killed three people; 264 people were injured in the twin blasts.

And the Savin Hill Rangers Little League team opened their season Saturday, paying tribute to one of their players, Martin Richard, who was killed in the bombings. During the opening day parade, players and firefighters wore shirts and carried signs with the number 8, Martin's age and his jersey number.

A Tupelo, Mississippi, man has been charged with sending ricin- laced letters to President Obama and Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker. The federal charges against James Everett Dutschke come two days after prosecutors dropped charges against Paul Kevin Curtis in the same case. Curtis says he was framed.

A roadside bomb killed three police officers in Afghanistan this morning as the Taliban launched their annual spring offensive. The Taliban spokesman says today's attack was just the first day of the new operation that will target foreign military bases and convoys, as well as attacks on Afghan police. The spokesman said the attacks will continue until foreign troops leave Afghanistan.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer is recovering at a Washington hospital after undergoing shoulder surgery following a bicycle fall. This is the third publicly known major bike crash for Breyer. The Supreme Court says Breyer is expected to head home early this week, hopefully not on a bike.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CROWLEY: And those are your top stories. "RELIABLE SOURCES" is at the top of the hour. Now back to FAREED ZAKARIA GPS.

ZAKARIA: We're now piecing together how the alleged Boston bombers radicalized themselves over the Internet and posted their thoughts on Twitter.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA (voice-over): But we've also watched as the Internet disseminated their images within a few minutes, thus beginning the sequence of events that led to their capture.

So is technology something that's a help or a hindrance? I have a great person to answer that question. Eric Schmidt is the executive chairman of Google, and he has a new book that explores this and other ideas. It's called "The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business."

Schmidt's co-author also joins us. Jared Cohen is the director of Google Ideas and has worked previously at the State Department and is a member of the Time 100, I should add. Thank you, guys.

So, when you watch this, this Boston episode, what did you think about the power of technology for -- this process of self-radicalizing on the Internet is just fascinating, where people no longer need a community; they no longer need a leader. They can just kind of find all that information out there.

ERIC SCHMIDT, EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, GOOGLE: Look, this is a terrible thing in Boston and, obviously, we don't want it to happen again. There were some good digital stories about it. The use of crowd sourcing of the photos, the fact that somebody left a cell phone that was tracked to help find and ultimately cause the shootout with the two that killed the one, et cetera.

The fact of the matter is people have gotten bad information from books and so forth; now it's more readily available on the Internet.

But overwhelmingly the Internet is used for a positive force and it can be used to catch these people.

ZAKARIA: And that's why at the end of the day, Eric, you say, look, we can look at the way in which China monitors the Internet or people use the Internet for bad reasons, but ultimately, it's a hopeful story, you think.

SCHMIDT: It is. And one way to understand it is we're all going through a journey together. And that journey goes from relatively little connectivity and little knowledge to having everyone in the world be connected. That is overwhelmingly positive for medical care, for education, for safety, for security, for commerce, for global expansion, for trade, for any of the things that we care about.

It's overwhelmingly good. Now, it also brings some bad people to the table that we didn't hear from before and we need to figure out a way to anticipate that and deal with them. But, overwhelmingly, people are good; 99.99 percent of the people's worlds are very, very good. That's our solution.

ZAKARIA: But it does connect and allow to network and leverage the power of very small groups. And you actually talk about this in the book. So what do you -- how do you detect them? What do you do?

JARED COHEN, CO-AUTHOR, "THE NEW DIGITAL AGE": Well, first, the challenge of violent extremism is -- it's a very small, albeit very loud minority group that occupies the attention of the world. But the good news is that in the future it's going to be very hard to imagine a terrorist being able to operate in the caves of Tora Bora and be even close to relevant.

So terrorists of the future have to opt in to technology. The room for error goes up significantly. They leave a digital trail. They make mistakes and especially when they're on the run, it's hard to go through that checklist every second, every moment.

We interviewed several Navy SEALs for the book and they told us a great story about trying to track a senior Al Qaeda commander in Pakistan that they had lost track of. And professionally he had been very careful, throwing away SIM cards, throwing away phones, disposing of them quickly.

But he had a 45-minute conversation with his cousin in Afghanistan about how thrilled he was to be coming to his wedding.

Next thing you know, he's caught. If they make a mistake professionally or socially, the whole thing comes unraveled and then you get their SIM cards. So you get everybody they're working with.

SCHMIDT: In the digital world, there's so many ways in which you interact with the digital world, where there's a reminiscence of memory, of fact. It's very hard to escape that sort of digital dragnet if you're a bad person.

ZAKARIA: And now what do we do when the good guys might not be the good guys, by which I mean the people with the resources might themselves have their own motives. You know, I'm thinking of governments like Russia, perhaps even China in some areas and, of course, North Korea.

You had a celebrated trip to North Korea and I have to say the single best kind of "I was there" feel is your daughter's blog, which we link to on our website.

But what did you draw from that experience in North Korea?

SCHMIDT: You know, not all governments are in favor of citizen empowerment and free and open communication. And you can tell now.

The ones that allow the Internet in, they allow political free speech, they allow the expression of human values and the different cultures, those are the countries you want to be part of.

If you're stuck in a country that is authoritarian, you have a problem, because the government is not in your interest. In North Korea, our objective in going to North Korea was to convince them or at least try to get the idea of opening up a bit.

And what we found when we were there, aside from a sort of bizarre sort of a movie set that is the city in the way they all behave, was that the core thing that the North Koreans don't want to do is allow their citizens to understand that there are other points of view. Right?

The whole country is organized around a single belief system and you're taught from birth that this is the way. If the Internet shows up, they might say, hey, maybe there is an alternative way of running our country. Maybe the Supreme Leader is not quite so good. Maybe my conditions are not perfect. Maybe my country is not the only choice, and the system will unravel from within.

ZAKARIA: What about cyber-terrorism and cyber-attacks? What is going on with China, between the United States and China now? Is that the next, you know, is the Internet -- because it has become so dominant that the site where we might have our next conflict -- actual national, you know, international conflict?

COHEN: There is a fundamental argument that we make in the book that states we'll be willing to do things to each other in cyberspace that they're not willing to do in the physical world.

So if you look at the U.S. and China, it's a complex relationship, but by all accounts, they're physical world allies.

In cyberspace, it's as adversarial as you can possibly imagine. So the question that we ask is a what point does a cyber-attack, whether it's for stealing intellectual property or for testing the waters to see what they can get away with, at what point does it become so significant and so severe that it warrants some kind of physical world response?

SCHMIDT: And it's worth saying, by the way, that it's not just China -- we always focus on China -- but other countries are engaging in this. For example, we talk about the Iranian activities. There's evidence that Russia is doing it. Many people think -- some of the Western European people have claimed that the United States is engaged in some of this.

So, it's not just China and the solution, of course, in America is for us to increase our defenses, to harden our systems.

ZAKARIA: Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen, pleasure to have you on.

COHEN: Thank you.

SCHMIDT: Thank you very much.

ZAKARIA: Up next, a story of a young man who comes to America, becomes disillusioned and then perhaps radicalized. No, it's not about Boston; it's a movie. It's out this week. I'll tell you about it with the director, when we come back.

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(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Acts of terrorism can provoke a number of responses. Last week in Boston we saw resilience. But it's also natural to react with fear and sometimes anger.

A new movie, a terrific movie explores this theme. "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" is set around the defining event of our times, 9/11. The movie tells the story of a suave young Pakistani living in New York City. He's a Princeton graduate and works for a top American bank, then suddenly his life changes after 9/11.

He feels profiled and threatened. Does he begin to sympathize with the terrorists? Is he becoming a fundamentalist? The film features Hollywood stars Liev Schreiber and Kate Hudson. It's a fascinating study of a man caught between America and Islam, a topic worth exploring any time, but especially today.

So I sat down with the film's director, Mira Nair. Listen in.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: I love the title of the book and the movie, "The Reluctant Fundamentalist." Is what drew you to it this sort of sense that this guy is occupying both worlds, both America and, in some sense, the world of Islam?

MIRA NAIR, DIRECTOR, "THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST": Well, my film is based on the wonderful book by Mohsin Hamid, the Pakistani author who wrote "The Reluctant Fundamentalist."

And the title is really an interesting one, but the reluctance -- it's not really a study of fundamentalism as we understand it, only of terror or of religion or becoming a fundamentalist.

It's also an examination and a falling out of love with the economic fundamentalism, the fundamentalism of money or capital.

ZAKARIA: But he -- there is a part of the movie where he is, as you say, eagerly embracing America and eagerly embracing Wall Street and become a kind of master of the universe.

And then 9/11 happens and he just happens to be out of the country and he flies back and suddenly, for the first time, he realizes and the realization dawns on him slowly, my God, they're not looking at me like every other person. They're looking at me differently because I have brown skin and a funny name.

NAIR: Exactly.

ZAKARIA: And that is the moment where he begins to realize, I'm actually not as integrally part of the society as I thought I was.

NAIR: Exactly. And perhaps he can never be. You know, I mean, the film is really made because of that. It's not otherwise. I mean, I live in this country for half my life. I come from the subcontinent half my life, like Mohsin himself.

And what is really disturbing to me is how the conversation that we have here about the subcontinental world or anything to do with the Islamic world is always a monologue, not a conversation. We never really hear it from that side of things.

ZAKARIA: You say that when Americans look at the world of Islam, they don't understand that those are ordinary people. They have their lives.

One of the things you do try to do in the movie is to convey that reality so that you see resemblance, family in Lahore, and they're a very kind of normal upper middle class family that is partly fascinated by America, you know, but has reservation, but mostly is engaged in its day-to-day life.

(CROSSTALK) NAIR: Yes. The father is a poet. They used to have money, now they don't have money but they have class. And they're not worried about it. But the young man is worried. He wants to go to America; he wants to make a fortune. He wants to bring his family back to the exalted society that they used to belong to.

But the father is not concerned. He writes his poems and he lives in his world.

ZAKARIA: Yes. Do you think the appeal of fundamentalism, of Islamic fundamentalism, is that it is, in some way, a kind of coherent alternative to this -- to a Western idea of money and success and things like that, that it seems to pull at some other chords that people have?

Because he says, Riz Ahmed says -- the hero says at one point, you know, that when 9/11 happened, I had a flicker of awe, even, that people could pull this off. And, you know, what that suggests is that there was some pull there for him.

NAIR: I mean, what we are suggesting and what we know is that the world is a really complicated place. And in looking at and presenting the humanity in both the worlds, as complicatedly as we do, I want to be unflinching about the fact that, you know, the reaction to 9/11 was not always one way. People had different reactions to it.

And as our hero says, yes, he felt a sense of awe or at the audacity of this terrible act, but he asks his American friend, he says, but don't you feel anything when 100,000 people are killed equally in Baghdad or Afghanistan or Syria or any of the above?

I mean, the terrible thing about what has happened in Boston is that Boston has now become another city that has been affected by the same terror that is a global suffering. You know, the suffering has been so global. And now it has come in front of us. And that is what is shocking people and it must shock people.

But this terror, this suffering happens in any day in any city in the world, you know, in our part of the world. And that suffering is caused by a cycle of events.

I mean, we have to understand that, wherever we are, we are simply a part of the world, you know. We are not the center of the world. And I think that's very important -- that's what led me to make "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" because, unless we tell our own stories, no one else will tell them.

ZAKARIA: Well, it's a terrific and very moving movie.

NAIR: Thank you so much, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Mira Nair, pleasure to have you on.

NAIR: Thank you.

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ZAKARIA (voice-over): Up next, why the greenback is changing its hue.

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ZAKARIA (voice-over): The government of Greece reported this week that the unemployment rate for that country hit an astonishing 27.2 percent in January. It got me wondering whether that was higher or lower than the highest unemployment rate recorded in the United States during the Great Depression, which is my question of the week.

What was the peak unemployment rate in the U.S. during the Great Depression? A, 15 percent; B, 21 percent; C, 25 percent or D, 34 percent? Stay tuned. We'll tell you the correct answer. Go to CNN.com/fareed for more of the GPS challenge and lots of insight and analysis. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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ZAKARIA: Also, remember, you can go to itunes.com/fareed if you ever miss a show or a special.

This week's book of the week is, "The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business." It's by Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, Google's director of Ideas, who were on the show.

The book is a masterful tour of all the issues that are raised by the dominant technological trend of our time, which is the information revolution. It's a must read for anyone who wants to understand the New World.

Now, for the last look.

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ZAKARIA (voice-over): Take your first look at the new $100 bill. When the government released a sneak peek this week, critics in America were less than thrilled about the new Franklin. It seems Americans like their greenbacks green and many were taken aback by the shades of purple and orange.

But perhaps Ben Franklin's more important constituency today is overseas. After a little, almost two-thirds of all $100 bills circulate overseas, not stateside, according to a study by one of the government's own economists.

And perhaps that's fitting for a bill festooned with images of a man who lived and loved the ex-pat life, first in London to represent colonial Pennsylvania and then in Paris to represent the young United States.

I have to wonder, though, what Franklin, a printer, would make of the high-tech anti-counterfeiting measures that are meant to stop people from printing his image.

The correct answer to our GPS challenge question was C. In 1933, the U.S. unemployment rate peaked at 25 percent. That's an annual rate for all of 1933.

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ZAKARIA: Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week. Stay tuned for "RELIABLE SOURCES."

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