Covered: Terrorism, Middle East
internationalist, basically Arab al-Qaeda and the local Afghan Taliban with its pretty parochial aims, was tense. I found letters in al-Qaeda training camps after the invasion of 2001 which showed how the Arabs thought the Afghans were a bunch of useless, illiterate hicks. For their part the Taliban resented bin Laden grandstanding and were obviously worried about Western reaction to the terrorist attacks he was organising. Nor did they have any warning about 9/11. In the end though, of course, they sided with AQ and pulled off a successful tactical retreat into Pakistan.
for violence, a small number – in this case a few dozen – are going to try something. The years from 2002 to 2005/6 saw significant numbers of Western Muslims (in the case of the London bombings) and of Muslims living in the West (in the case of Madrid) becoming more radical and mobilised. The security services around Europe stopped most attacks. Some got through, however. That level of mobilisation has now dropped radically, MI5 and MI6 now say, which is good news. The number of British-Pakistanis heading to training camps in the Pakistani tribal zones is a fraction of what it was.
U: When did it go wrong for the West in Afghanistan? JB: From the beginning, due to the failure of Western policymakers and strategists to read the situation. But it only became evident by about 2004 or 2005 that the Taliban hadn’t evaporated but were coming back in, cleverly exploiting disappointment, anger and a power vacuum across their old heartlands in the south and east. In 2002, you could drive all over the country pretty much without any serious concerns. By 2006, I drove the main Kabul-to-Kandahar road and it was a fairly frightening experience. Since then it’s been pretty much closed to Westerners. Looking back, the attitude of Western powers in those early years post-2001 seems incredibly naive.
U: What’s your view on the many conspiracy theories surrounding the West, 9/11 and al-Qaeda? JB: One of the most deeply depressing things about the work I’m doing is encountering people all over the world who still insist that the CIA or Mossad or the Bush administration or whoever were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. There is absolutely no evidence to back up these claims, or certainly none that I or any of the people I respect in the field have ever found. I simply don’t understand the need to find some other explanation for what seems to me to be pretty simple: a terrorist organisation launched an attack which successfully evaded the systems at the time that were designed to protect America. I can just comprehend the attraction of conspiracy theories to some in the Middle East but that intelligent, educated Europeans still insist on imagining these hidden agendas and background plots is genuinely saddening.
U: Moving to 2003. Why did the Iraq war inflame such anger in the Muslim world? Were any Iraqis in favour of it? JB: Well, many of the Iraqis that I spent a lot of time with – the Kurds in the north – were very keen to see Saddam deposed. A large number of the Shia majority too were certainly not against the idea. But in much of the Islamic world, it was seen as the worst sort of Western neo-imperialism and confirming the widespread perception that the West was set on the subordination and humiliation of Muslims. That Saddam Hussein was largely secular and horrifically violent towards his own Muslim people wasn’t the point. Then of course post-invasion you had civilian casualties, looting, prisoner abuse and scenes of US troops shooting demonstrators.
U: Where will al-Qaeda conduct future operations? JB: You can never say never but the likelihood is of small-scale freelance attacks by individuals or small groups claiming to be part of AQ rather than AQ itself. These could occur pretty much anywhere but are naturally most likely in zones of instability where AQ affiliates are most active: the Yemen, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and Pakistan.
‘IN the islamic world, iraq was seen as the worst sort of western imperialism’
U: What was al-Qaeda strategy in Iraq? How did it justify the deaths of the thousands of Muslims it caused? JB: Al-Qaeda’s strategy in Iraq was not run by the central leadership which made significant efforts to try and reclaim authority there over figures like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the brutal former street thug from Jordan who was the effective head locally. He saw Shia Muslims as a major target partly because he hated them as supposed heretics and partly because he genuinely wanted to foment a civil war. He succeeded in many ways. But his brutality and indiscriminate violence forced many local people to reconsider their support for the militants which itself was part of the broader process of Muslim populations across the Middle East and elsewhere turning away from extremism over the second half of the decade of ‘the 9/11 wars’ as I call them in the new book. U: Were the bombings in London and Madrid inevitable after Iraq? JB: Only in the sense that with millions of people getting very angry about something at a time when there is a free-floating ideology that explicitly calls
U: How has working on the subject of terrorism affected you and people who care about you? JB: My mum’s very pleased that I’m not covering Iraq intensively any more! Personally, I’ve always been more interested in the human stories that underpin terrorism, not the grand theories. I did a calculation in my book of how many casualties we have seen in all the various conflicts associated with 9/11 and AQ over the last decade, and the total is around 250,000 dead and many times that injured. Then of course there are all the displaced, the bereaved and so on. I don’t think anyone – specialist reporter or not – has come out of the last decade unchanged by what we have witnessed. The 9/11 Wars by Jason Burke is out now, published by Allen Lane. Burke is also the author of Al-Qaeda: The Story of Radical Islam and On The Road to Kandahar: Travels Through Conflict in The Islamic World www.penguin.co.uk
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