The 9/11 Wars by Jason Burke Page A

and explained even in some 500 pages. The path this narrative takes is thus not necessarily the most direct or the most obvious. The places it visits are not always the most central. In journalism, analysis and academia there is a natural trend to the general, the global and the aggregated. The complex and often messy reality of history as it happens is reduced to single explanations or overarching theories. Though without synthesis nothing is comprehensible, there is a risk that, in reducing the complexity to find an answer, that answer is wrong. The devil is very often in the detail. Much of this book is devoted to exploring this detail.
    The dangers of relying on broad generalizations or analyses that ignore the specificities of place, history, personality, culture and identity is very evident in the pages that follow. One early and costly error was a fundamental failure to properly understand the phenomenon of ‘al-Qaeda’. This took years to right. A broader mistake which also proved tragically expensive in lives and resources was the insistence that the violence suddenly sweeping two, even three, continents was the product of a single, unitary conflict pitting good against evil, the West against Islam, the modern against the retrograde. For the last decade has not seen one conflict but many. Inevitably, a multi-polar, multifaceted, chaotic world without overarching ideological narratives generates conflicts in its own image. The events described in this book can only be understood as part of a matrix of ongoing, overlaid, interlinked and overlapping conflicts, some of which ended during the ten years since 9/11 and some of which started; some of which worsened and some of which died away; some of which have roots going back decades if not centuries and some of which are relatively recent in origin.
    This is not a unique characteristic of the current crisis but is certainly one of its essential distinguishing qualities. 1 The wars that make up this most recent conflict span the globe geographically – from Indonesia in the east to the Atlantic-Mediterranean coastline in the west, from south-west China to south-west Spain, from small-town America to small-town Pakistan – as well as culturally, politically and ideologically. With no obvious starting point and no obvious end, with no sense of what might constitute victory or defeat, their chronological span is impossible to determine. No soldiers at the battle of Castillon in 1453 knew they were fighting in the last major engagement of the Hundred Years War. No one fighting at Waterloo could have known they were taking part in what turned out to be the ultimate confrontation of the Napoleonic Wars. The First World War was the Great War until the Second World War came along. Inevitably perhaps, this present conflict is currently without a name. In decades or centuries to come historians will no doubt find one – or several, as is usually the case. In the interim, given the one event that, in the Western public consciousness at least, saw hostilities commence, ‘the 9/11 Wars’ seems an apt working title for a conflict in progress.
    Another major theme running through this work is inevitably that of religious extremism. What motivates the militants? How are they radicalized and mobilized? Why do they and how can they commit such terrible acts? The answer, as this narrative seeks to make clear, does not appear to lie in poverty, insanity or innate evil. Nor does it lie in Islam, though Islam, like all great religions, has a wide range of resources within it that can be deployed for a variety of functions including encouraging or legitimizing violence. The problem is not Islam but a particularly complex fusion of the secular and the religious that is extremely difficult to counter. The critical question is why this ideology, itself continually evolving, appeals to any given individual or community at a given moment. The answer, as one would expect, varies hugely over