V This week is full of memories and memorials — of where we were when we heard first of the attacks on the east coast of America that would come to be known simply as 9/11, of the 3,000 who died in that wave of violence and those that followed it, and of the massive changes wrought to our world and our lives by a single man at the head of a single terrorist group with one single-minded, destructive and bloody ambition.
Most of the conversation over the coming days will try to make sense of the consequences and the reactions. These were important, ranging from the distraction of the world’s most powerful nation from its own domestic problems and more global issues such as climate change or the rise of China, through to the deep polarisation and instability brought both by successive attacks and the often clumsy “War on terror”.
Some are deeply personal. I spent months in Afghanistan when the Taliban was last in power. I witnessed executions, poverty and fear. Within days of the 9/11 attacks, I was in Peshawar, the Pakistani frontier city, and followed opposition forces across the border, eventually to Kabul as the Taliban crumbled. I reported on the long war that followed, not just in Afghanistan but Iraq, elsewhere in the Middle East, then on the streets of London and other European cities.
Like others, this anniversary has pushed me too to put my thoughts about these events in some order. There are many lessons to be learned from the last 20 years.
Some are undoubtedly depressing: how simple it appears for a small number of individuals to use the resources contained within a faith to manipulate resentment and anger to foment terrible violence against imagined enemies; how growing prosperity or education or globalisation is no preventative panacea to extremism and may even be its opposite; how there is no silver bullet to a complicated and dynamic problem that will almost certainly be with us for another 20 years, too.
For the world’s Jewish communities, there is another profoundly disturbing lesson: that old lies can be swiftly reformulated in pernicious new ways to encourage a surge of prejudice that many hoped, perhaps naively, was consigned to history books.
Others are more positive: we have learned much more about the threat that faces us, how it does not pose an existential danger to our nations and homes, and how the best defence against it lies in a combination of international cooperation, careful but resolute use of force, the reason and moderation of the vast proportion of the world’s Muslims who reject extremist violence, and adherence to the basic principles of law on which we have built our societies. Not all of these elements are always easy to reconcile, but the reality is that we have done some things right. The US has suffered more casualties from right wing extremism since September 12 2001 than it has from attacks by Islamic militants, while the latter have killed around a hundred in the UK. Every one of these deaths is a tragedy, but these numbers tell us that we have been successful in at least mitigating the threat.
But no one can claim it has been eliminated. This should not surprise us. One of the problems with the focus on the 9/11 attacks this coming week, is that we will be tempted to see that moment 20 years ago as a departure point. Instead, we should see it as a marker, a signpost on a much longer and very winding road that reaches back not just to the 1980s, and the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan that launched the modern movement of Sunni Islamic extremism, not the 1970s and the Iranian revolution that set its Shia counterpart in motion, but to the 1960s, the 1930s or even the middle decades of the 19th century. Only by looking at the past of this threat, can we understand its future.
Why start with the late 19th century when we are talking about a clear and present danger now? Not because this was the beginning of the Zionist project in Israel, as some have maintained. Islamic revivalist movements long predate the first Aliyah let alone the Balfour declaration. In Afghanistan, Sudan, the Arabian Peninsula, and elsewhere, faith provided a flag around which otherwise diverse and competing communities could rally around to take on a mutual enemy. Sometimes this was another Muslim force, and both protagonists might claim to be the “true believers”. Increasingly often, and certainly by the early 20th century, this was likely to be an invading western European state and its local auxiliaries. The latter usually won these contests, often deploying massively superior arms backed by newly wealthy industrialised economies and processes to brutally crush any resistance.
These successive defeats, experienced as rolling waves across the Islamic world, prompted an interrogation of the reasons for failure. Some saw a need to adopt western ways lock, stock and barrel. Others wanted to reject them in entirely, in favour of regeneration through rigorous reversion to the “fundamentals” of their faith, and so the recreation of a nostalgically imagined time when the Mughals or the Ottomans were the superpowers of their day. Most sought a compromise between the two approaches. Some pursued their aims peacefully; others violently. These latter are with us to this day.
The extremist element of this recurrent revivalism still takes many forms. There are groups like Hamas, Hezbollah or the Taliban which have combined political and social work with suicide or rocket attacks and, though primarily locally focussed, engage in international politics. But there is also the Islamic State whose fervent belief in apocalyptic prophesy and total rejection of all who do not share its brutal vision preclude any relations even with al-Qaeda let alone less extreme interlocutors. This variety too teaches us an important lesson, and once again one that can be learned from reaching back beyond 9/11.
In the 1960s, though forced into the shadows by the fiery “revolutionary” nationalism coursing through the Arab world at the time, violent Islamists in Egypt and elsewhere called on young Muslims to reject the teachings of their parents or traditional clerics and take up the “neglected duty” of jihad, violence in the name of the faith.
In the 1970s, they moved swiftly to fill the void left by the failure of secular ideologies and regimes, exploiting new technologies like cassettes to spread their messages. The 1980s saw a proliferation of local campaigns to impose a rigorous version of Sharia law in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Syria and beyond.
Through the next decade, such campaigns began to go global, with “the domain of struggle” now extended beyond the Middle East, indeed beyond the Islamic world entirely according to Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for the punishment of Salman Rushdie, a British citizen living in Britain. Now it was videos that carried the words of the extremist preachers, and it would be satellite television that at the decade’s end, would carry those of Osama bin Laden after his first major attack: on US embassies in east Africa.
Since, we have seen new evolutions: a slow retreat by al-Qaeda from the global strategy that the 9/11 attacks epitomised and a return to something more local, the pitiless exploitation of the spread of the internet and social media by the Islamic State to promote “leaderless” violence, the new emergence of “micro-jihads” in far-flung locations such as Mozambique or the Philippines.
There are some constants – one is the ambition to destroy Israel, another is a profound anti-Americanism, a third is the constant invocation of a single Islamic identity where none exists – but what this history teaches us above all is that the nature of the danger that we face does not evolve in a vacuum. When the zeitgeist is all about challenging social hierarchies, that is what violent Islamists do. When it is about globalisation, then that is what the extremists favour. Once the pendulum swings back towards something more local and more “authentic”, so do the militants. When media technology demands single “blockbuster” attacks that will attract the attention of major international news networks, then you get 9/11. If innovations now allow the sharing of content between billions without the filter of a newspaper or TV editor, then the extremists switch to smaller scale, but more numerous attacks which have equal if not greater impact and are much easier to execute.
The conclusion is salutary and sanguine in equal parts. The threat against us reflects the world we live in. It has been with us for decades, and to expect it to simply disappear any time soon is unrealistic.
Equally however, we can tell ourselves that we have not just survived for many, many years, but done much more. Yes, we have made sacrifices, and suffered tragedy and trauma. Of course, the cost is high, and the consequences of all the violence we have seen in recent decades significant. But we have many other things to do, plan, enjoy and worry about before the threat posed by Islamic extremists, and this itself is a victory.
Jason Burke is Africa Correspondent of the Guardian
