The 9/11 Wars by Jason Burke

Introduction
     
    If you had looked down through binoculars on to the battered runway of Bagram in the summer of 1998 from frontline Taliban positions on the heights overlooking the Shomali plains, 30 miles north of Kabul, you would have seen little that indicated the role the old Soviet-built airbase could possibly play over the coming years. Through the dust and haze, you would have made out a cluster of ruined buildings surrounded by broad zones of overgrown land strewn with rusting metal stakes, a single battered jeep and no actual aircraft at all on the scarred strip of concrete shimmering in the Afghan sun. The group of scruffy Taliban fighters in filthy clothes who manned the makeshift trenches on the heights would probably have served grapes and tea to you as they did to the rare reporters who wandered up to the frontline in the dead years when no one was interested very much in an intractable and incomprehensible civil war in a far-off land. Occasionally, the fighters fired a rusty artillery piece in the general direction of the airstrip and of their enemies, usually hitting neither.
    If you had come back four years later, say in the spring of 2002, you would have seen a startling difference. With the Taliban apparently defeated and dispersed, a bright new era for Afghanistan seemed to be dawning. The once-ruined airstrip down on the plains had become the fulcrum of a build-up of American and other international forces in the country that would continue inexorably over the next years. The bulldozers, the tents going up in the sand and the jets and helicopters lined up in serried ranks on the newly surfaced runway gave a sense that something extraordinary was happening, something of genuine historical importance. The only problem was that the exact nature of its importance was still very unclear. Now, many years on, though much inevitably remains obscured by the immediacy of events, something of that nature has become clearer. The form and the flow of events are beginning to emerge from the chaos of war. This book is an attempt to describe them and through describing them to make sense of them. Bagram is now a small town of around 10,000 people, with its own shopping centres, gyms, evening classes, pizza parlour, Burger King, multi-denominational places of worship and mess halls all protected by treble rows of razor wire and electrified fences. The Taliban are in the hills around, though not yet back in their former positions from where they fired their poorly aimed shells and shared their tea and grapes.
    As this book is rooted in many years of ground reporting, it has a different perspective from many of the works written about the events of the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Its focus is not the decisions taken in Western capitals but the effects of those decisions. Its aim is to suggest a grubby view from below, rather than a lofty view from above. It is primarily about people rather than about power, particularly people for whom life has changed in ways that no one could have predicted a decade ago. Occasionally these changes have been for the better; sometimes it is still too early to tell what they will bring; often these changes have been, savagely and brutally, for the worse. Sometimes these individuals and communities are passive victims. Often they are actors. Either way, they are not those whose decisions and motivations dominate many accounts. It is out of this intricate web of individuals, communities and events, however, that the story of the conflicts which we have watched, been touched by, even participated in directly or indirectly, is inevitably woven.
    This account does not pretend to be objective. Though one aim of the book is to provide a historical record, it does not pretend to be comprehensive either. Such a work, even if practically realizable, would probably be unreadable. Too much has happened in too many places to too many people in too complex a way for it to be compressed