The 9/11 Wars [Hardcover]

Firstly, the listing with ISBN 978 1846 14274 1 is a hardback not a paperback as currently listed by Amazon. I have tried to correct the listing but it has not been amended at the time of writing this review.

This is an excellent book. I have read the detailed newspaper accounts and watched the documentaries - and live news - over the past ten years and often found it difficult to understand exactly how events related to each other and who was who and what the real back story was. This is a clear, detailed, and very specific account of 9/11, the world's reaction to it and the consequences of the actions the Americans and the British in particular undertook. Events are precisely described and interpreted - where there is uncertainty this is made clear. The human element is always to the fore - even though there is much also on the politics and the logistics

The notes - all 120 pages of them - are an essential component of the book. The bibliography is also comprehensive and valuable.

My only slight criticism is that it is sometimes a little hard to read - a great wodge of prose thrown at you that you need to work through very slowly and carefully to make sure you have absorbed it. But in many ways it is also the better for that.

Strongly recommended to any with an interest in this subject.

Jason Burke has written an excellent account not of the War on Terror but of the 9/11 wars, the wars mainly fought in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan but by no means confined to these places, wars which in his reckoning have claimed 250,000 lives over the past decade.

The first part of the book deals with the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the attack on Afghanistan and the swift eviction of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Part 2 covers the invasion of Iraq and the slide of the country into civil war. Part 3 turns to Europe in 2005-06, with bombs exploding in London and Madrid and Muslim youths rioting in French cities. Part 4 deals with the Iraq insurgency, while Part 5 covers Pakistan and Afghanistan (again). Part 6 concludes with a survey of the principal theatres of the 9/11 wars and what the future might hold.

The 9/11 wars cannot be considered examples of 'a clash of civilisations' but they were still ideological wars. George Bush Jnr. and Tony Blair defined the issue in Manicheistic terms, every bit as much as their opponents did. The disastrous consequences of this thinking were of course realised in Iraq: Iraqis were glad to see the back of Saddam, but this didn't mean they wanted democracy imposed on them at gunpoint. The occupiers failed to appreciate the depth of wounded pride an occupation would entail.

Refracting complex local situations through the lens of counter-terrorism produced further negative consequences. Burke presents ovewhelming and damning evidence that the massive use of torture and incommunicado detention sanctioned by the US and indulged by the UK (of which Guantanamo Bay was merely the tip of the iceberg)simply ended up making new enemies of those who might otherwise been supportive or at the very least neutral. As one Afghan elder, detained for two years in Guantanamo Bay on false charges of being a senior Taliban commander remarked, to inflict an injustice on him was to inflict it on his extended male kin networks - all 300 of them.

The so-called surge in Iraq in 2007 marked a shift not just in tactics but in ideology, a `cultural turn' as Burke puts it: the Americans came to accept a Shia-dominated sectarian democracy, aligned with Iran, in the interests of stability. Iraq now enjoys a fragile, `ugly peace.' To achieve this meant the US and the UK abandoning ambitions to refashion Iraq on the lines of a free market democracy. The country is by no means out of the woods yet - sectarianism runs deep, the embers of an Islamist insurgency still smoulder, infrastructure remains dilapidated.

However, Al-Qaeda's alternative, a messianic vision of a globalised Islam, of a return to a mythical golden age, deracinated from Islam's multiple local understandings and accretions, fared no better. The dream of a pan-Islamic unity, transcending all other identities such as tribe, race, nation and class has failed. Indeed Burke notes the resilience of ` artificial' nation-states like Iraq and Pakistan, the citizens of which still wish to live under the same roof, even when they are killing one another (one notes that the case was the same with Libya. Both sides claimed to be fighting to unite Libya. Partition was a `solution' enthusiastically espoused by Westerners, not Libyans). There is no widespread longing to return to a golden age of a united Ummah.

Key to this failure was the radical Islamists, in demanding ever more exacting standards of pious purity, to round on and kill fellow believers whom they considered insufficiently devout. Bombings by Islamists which claimed the lives of the faithful in Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other places turned popular opinion against the Jihadists, to the detriment of the global aims of Al-Qaeda.

A representative example of this was the Jordanian-born sadistic thug Abu Musab al-Zarqawi , Al-Qaeda's leading man in Iraq: initially aligned with anti-American insurgents, he and his men's growing insistence on subordinating the local, national aims of the insurgency to pan-Islamic ones, their strictures against smoking, watching Egyptian soap operas, and their trying it on with local women, led to open conflict between Iraqi nationalists and foreign Jihadists, a conflict that the latter were bound to lose. Al-Zarqawi himself died in an American air strike. If Al-Qaeda could not establish itself in the chaos and mayhem of Iraq, it wasn't going to establish itself anywhere.

Meanwhile, the riots of French Muslim youths in 2005 did not herald the beginning of a dreaded European Intifada, but was an expression of a local French difficulty, albeit a very serious one. The defining issue was not the global Jihad, but the shortfall between ideal and reality in French notions of citizenship. Talk of Europe being swamped by Muslims is hype: Muslim birth rates are falling in line with native birth rates.

Does this mean we can breathe easily, then? Well, not quite. Afghanistan continues its descent into chaos. The West does not have the means or the will to stamp out a renascent Pashtun Taliban insurgency, feared and loathed by other groups in the country. The future is anything but bright. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state, lurches from crisis to crisis, and plays a double game with militants in Afghanistan and its own Wild West, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (which gets a whole chapter in the book, entitled tellingly `Another Country'). There is little evidence that the rise of a middle class in the country correlates with greater acceptance of secular, liberal values. The same can be said for much of the Islamic world. Even though Al-Qaeda as an organisation is a spent force, it is still capable of franchising its `brand' among groups or individuals, disaffected and difficult to detect. This does not mean that they pose an existential threat to the very survival of democratic society but the threat of fresh outrages is a hazard we are going to have to live with indefinitely.

The book covers a lot of ground, and unpicks a variety of issues with great dexterity. I came away with some of my own assumptions challenged and no doubt you will likewise, if you choose to read it. For instance, I had assumed the Pakistani Madrasas provided much of the Taliban's cannon fodder. This is too simple. While many of these schools provide a hideously bigoted and distorted version of education, many Pakistani militants are likely to have been educated in government schools (pp. 347-349). Likewise, I learned that the CIA did not fund Bin Laden or `create' Al-Qaeda as is often claimed: the foundation of Al-Qaeda was not the result of American intervention in any way (p.20).

When it's noted that a book is written by a journalist, the observation is frequently derogatory. Jason Burke is of course a journalist but this is not the work of a hack with an axe to grind. He dispenses with the ideological platitudes of both right and left. If you are looking for a denunciation of `Islamophobia' or' Islamofascism', or confirmation of your favourite conspiracy theory, you will not find it here. Instead he has written a first-class empirical analysis, based on immersion in both primary sources and secondary literature, on numerous interviews with academics, diplomats, insurgents, police, soldiers, spies and (failed) suicide bombers, and on first-hand experience of many of the events about which he is writing, which adds additional authority. All other books written by the `hacks' are left in the shade by Burke. They shouldn't write or speak another word about the 9/11 wars until they have read this book.

Jason Burke has dedicated a vast amount of time to studying the War on Terror. He has stalked the planet researching the consequences of the terrorist attack, and the ongoing reaction to that atrocity. He is a journalist that does credit to his profession, asking the right questions, going beyond mere acceptance of the answers. And he is tough, living alongside troops at war, or speaking to villagers in the various warzones. The book is especially good on Afghanistan, Iraq, and the enigma that is Al-Qaeda.