The 9/11 Wars (85 page)

What major factors had determined the course of the 9/11 Wars so far? The answer is the key lesson from the last decade. In the introduction to this work, the importance of the tension between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ was flagged as critical to the evolution of the conflict. This was repeatedly proven over the course of the years. At every level, the resistance offered by the particular to the general was crucial. At the grandest scale, it was the rejection of the globalized ideology of radical Islam propagated by bin Laden and others like him in around 2005 and 2006 by hundreds of millions of Muslims across the Islamic world that marked the major turning point in the conflict. The message of bin Laden, deliberately stripped of local specificity and as disrespectful of local custom or belief as anything emanating from the West, began losing popularity among its primary audience when its local implications became clear. Al-Qaeda’s call to arms had had some broad appeal, plugging into deep-felt feelings of humiliation and a defensive narrative that had become widespread over previous decades as well as a range of broader social, demographic and economic factors that in some cases dated back a century or more. This attraction was not diminished – indeed it was often deepened – when the militants married deeds to words, when bombs exploded in distant towns, strikes were launched on distant cities, particularly American ones, or when occupying forces in the heart of the Middle East were attacked. But when the violence came home, it provoked a very different reaction. The sight of blood on one’s own streets, the dismembered bodies of one’s own compatriots, the grieving parents who could have been one’s own – as well as the evident economic and cultural damage done by radical Islamic activism to any society – turned entire populations away from violence. When viewed from up close, the ideas and practices of men like bin Laden were much less appealing than they appeared on the internet or on the evening news, and the impact on established local customs, identities, practices and communities much greater. The result was that both Abu Musab al-Suri’s plans for a global uprising, apparently so close to being fulfilled in 2005, and the ‘open front’ strategy favoured by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which once also looked like succeeding, foundered on the stubborn parochialism that characterizes most people’s vision of the world most of the time.

It was not just the projects of the militants that were undermined by the resistance of ‘the local’ to the global. Early on in the 9/11 Wars, Western leaders, in particular President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, had, like the extremists, both understood and projected the conflict as part of a cosmic contest. Their decisions had, in part, been determined by a desire to propagate a series of universal principles. These may have been far more attractive than those of radical Islam but, particularly when they were imposed by force, could be as alienating. The key shift in the first decade of the conflict came when, at the same time as sentiment turned against al-Qaeda in the Islamic world, and in part as a result of this change, Western policy-makers and strategists began to question whether the earlier ideological approach was constructive and whether aggressively seeking generalized solutions based in a broad package of ‘liberal democratic’ and free-market capitalist ideas were likely to further the interests of the states they led in the conflict they now found themselves engaged in. From 2006 or 2007 onwards, new thinking based on a more careful consideration of the views, ideas, interests and values of the communities that in many ways constituted the battlefield in the 9/11 Wars began to be implemented. In every case – whether it was American soldiers on the ground in tough neighbourhoods of Baghdad, men and women from MI5 fanning out across the UK to be based in police stations, a return to intelligence services relying on human sources not merely telecommunications intercepts – the new tactics implied and brought a deeper understanding of other societies, a better knowledge of ‘human terrain’, a greater tolerance of difference and encouraged a new pragmatism. At a local level, such as in Iraq, this allowed local circumstances to be exploited to first slow and then reverse a descent into hellish violence. In Afghanistan, though coming too late and after too many errors to make a major difference, it at least mitigated some of the damage previously done. At a global level, the new approach allowed space for the growing antipathy towards violent extremism in the Islamic world to thrive and for the idea of ‘democracy’ to be divorced in the minds of many from a coercive project of Westernization. It encouraged the calmer atmosphere of the latter years of the decade. Without this shift, it is unlikely the relative stabilization of the threat that al-Qaeda and the movement of contemporary radical Muslim militancy posed could have occurred.

This approach – privileging the micro over the macro, the local over the global – helps us to understand the lessons of the 9/11 Wars as regards the nature and genesis of radical violence. In the search for an answer to the question of why or how ‘ordinary men’ become ‘terrorists’, the 9/11 Wars have taught us, once more, that the specific rather than the general is of most use. Early attempts at profiling – constructing general laws to designate masses of population as potentially dangerous – or to find universally relevant ‘predictor’ factors of militancy failed. In the later years of conflict, the discussion in counter-terrorist circles was instead about the process by which individuals became radicalized. It was no longer about the ‘who’ but about the ‘how’, and it focused on the role of friends or brothers or fathers, exposure to the internet, whom an individual happened to meet and when. The earlier approaches were rejected as too blunt to be of much use. The plotting of vertical hierarchies was replaced by the modelling of horizontal networks. Each path to violence was seen as unique and had to be dealt with as such. Extrapolation – ‘joining the dots’ – was thus replaced by ‘granularity’ – precise, knowledge-based, case-by-case analysis. Though some patterns could, of course, be discerned – a decline in the educational level of militants in Saudi Arabia from 2005 onwards, the rising proportion of converts in Europe over the decade or the increasing number of Iraqi suicide bombers with family members in prison in 2008 or 2009 – these were only useful for establishing what was going on in any one locality. Comparing the path into violence of, say, Abu Mujahed, the Sunni insurgent the author interviewed at length in Baghdad, and the 7/7 bombers, or of Abit, the Pakistani suicide bomber who failed to detonate his bomb at the last minute, and the drug-dealing ‘El Chino’ who had played such a key role in the Madrid bombings of 2004, was of limited use. As much as any new laws or powers for the police, it was this realization that enabled security services to feel more confident by 2008 or 2009 than they had done for many years previously. They had learned that the path to violence involves such a broad range of potential factors and situations that any single explanatory theory of why some are attracted to violence – religion, class, deprivation – was bound to fail. There are broad trends that can establish a background. There are short-term factors that may encourage a certain type of behaviour. There are catalysts which can spark a critical change for a specific individual or even a group. But, as in the 9/11 Wars as a whole, there are no global rules.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

Has the West won the 9/11 Wars? The West has certainly – despite al-Qaeda’s various successes over the years – avoided defeat. The power of terrorism resides in its ability to create a sense of fear far in excess of the actual threat posed to an individual. Here what has not happened is as significant as what has happened. Governments have largely protected their citizens, and few inhabitants of Western democracies or indeed Middle or Far Eastern nations today pass their lives genuinely concerned about being harmed in a radical militant attack.
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In July 2010, President Obama even spoke of how the USA could ‘absorb’ another 9/11, a statement that would have been inconceivable a few years before.
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Despite significant damage to civil liberties in both Europe and America, institutional checks and balances appear to have worked on both sides of the Atlantic. In the face of a worrying militarization and ‘securitization’, other forces have been strong enough to ensure that liberal democratic societies have kept their values more or less intact. The integration of minorities, always a delicate task, is generating significant tensions but is proceeding, albeit unevenly. Even though now facing serious problems of debt, America has been nonetheless able to pay for the grotesque strategic error of the war in Iraq, at a total cost of up to a trillion dollars depending on how it is calculated, and a ten-year conflict in Afghanistan all while financing a huge security industry at home in the midst of one of gravest economic crises for decades. In 2009, American military expenditure was $661 billion, considerably more than double the total of ten years previously and a sizeable enough sum, but still not enough, as bin Laden had hoped, to fundamentally weaken the world’s only true superpower.
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In Europe, supposedly creaking old democracies have reacted with a nimbleness and rapidity that few imagined they still possessed to counter domestic and international threats. In short Western societies and political systems appear likely to digest this latest wave of radical violence as they have digested its predecessors.
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In 1911, British police reported that leftist and anarchists groups had ‘grown in number and size’ and were ‘hardier than ever, now that the terrifying weapons created by modern science are available to them’. The world was ‘threatened by forces which would be able to one day carry out its total destruction,’ the police warned. In the event, of course, it was gas, machine guns and artillery followed by disease that killed millions, not terrorism.
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In the second decade of the 9/11 Wars other gathering threats to the global commonwealth such as climate change will further oblige Islamic radical militants to cede much of the limelight to those phenomena which genuinely do pose a planetary menace, at least in the absence of a new, equally spectacular cycle of violence.

But if there has been no defeat for the West then there has been no victory either. Over the last ten years, the limits of the ability of the USA and its Western allies to impose their will and vision on parts of the world have been very publicly revealed. Though it is going too far to say that the first decade of the 9/11 Wars saw the moment where the long decline of first Europe and perhaps America was made clear to the world, the conflict certainly reinforced the sense that the tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting. After its military and diplomatic checks in Iraq and Afghanistan, a chastened Britain may well have to finally renounce its inflated self-image as a power that ‘punches above its weight’. The role of NATO in the twenty-first century is unclear. Above all, though the power, soft and hard, cultural and economic, military and political, of the USA and Europe remains immense and often hugely underestimated, it is clear that this will not always be the case. For many decades, the conventional wisdom has been that economic development around the globe would necessarily render the project of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism more popular. One of the lessons of the 9/11 Wars is that this optimism was misplaced. A sense of national or religious chauvinism appears often to be a corollary of a society getting richer rather than its opposite, and the search for dignity and authenticity is often defined as much by opposition to what is seen, rightly or wrongly, as foreign as anything else. In some places, the errors of Western policy-makers over recent years have provoked a reaction which will last a long time. The socially conservative, moderately Islamist, and strongly nationalist, narrative that is being consolidated in Muslim countries from Morocco to Malaysia will pose a growing and increasingly coherent challenge to the ability of the USA and European nations to pursue their interests on the global stage for many years to come. This, alongside the increasingly strident voices of China and other emerging nations, means a long period instability and competition is likely before any new
modus vivendi
is reached. American intelligence agencies reported in their quadrennial review in late 2008 that they judged that within a few decades the USA would no longer be able to ‘call the shots’. Instead, they predicted, America is likely to face the challenges of a fragmented planet, where conflict over scarce resources is on the rise, poorly contained by ‘ramshackle’ international institutions.
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The previous review, published in December 2004, when President Bush had just been re-elected and was preparing his triumphal second inauguration, had foreseen ‘continued dominance’ for many years to come, considering that most major powers had effectively forsaken the idea of balancing the US.
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The difference over the intervening years from 2004 to 2008 is thus stark. If these years brought victory, then America and the West more generally cannot afford many more victories like it.

If clear winners in the 9/11 Wars are difficult to find, then the losers are not hard to identify. They are the huge numbers of men, women and children who have found themselves caught in multiple crossfires: the victims of the 9/11 strikes or of the 7/7 and Madrid bombings, of sectarian killings in Baghdad, badly aimed American drone strikes in Pakistan or attacks by teenage suicide bombers on crowds in Afghanistan. They are those executed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, those who died sprayed with bullets by US Marines at Haditha, those shot by private contractors careering in overpowered unmarked blacked-out four-wheel-drive vehicles through Baghdad. They are worshippers at Sufi shrines in the Punjab, local reporters trying to record what was happening to their home towns, policemen who happened to be on shift at the wrong time in the wrong place, unsuspecting tourists on summer holidays. They are the refugees who ran out of money and froze to death one by one in an Afghan winter, those many hundreds executed as ‘spies’ by the Taliban, those gunned down as they waited for trains home at Mumbai’s main railway station one autumn evening, those who died in cells in Bagram or elsewhere at the hands of their jailers, the provocative film-maker stabbed on an Amsterdam street, all the victims of this chaotic matrix of multivalent, confused but always lethal wars.