Monday will mark five years since the attacks of 11 September 2001. If one generation knew where they were when mankind first walked on the moon, another knows where they were when the Twin Towers crumbled. And they know where they were when coalition troops first entered Iraq. And when the bombs exploded in London a year ago. By the end of this decade, there is no doubt we will have other sad anniversaries of other terrible events to be mindful of.
There is a sense that history, far from ending, is accelerating. That the centre cannot hold. That the individual counts for nothing.
Certainly, Osama bin Laden, egoist though he may be, is convinced that his ”life or death does not matter”. This is because, as he said a few months after the 11 September attacks: ”The awakening has started.” An al-Qaeda video said much the same thing in his umpteenth similar statement last week. Times have changed but the song remains the same.
Bin Laden was in one sense right. His life or death doesn’t matter, but not for the reasons he thought. He meant that the attacks of 9/11, the culmination of a series of attempts which began in the late 1990s to use spectacular violence to spark a general uprising of the world’s Muslims, had been largely successful. And, he felt in December 2001, his work was more or less over.
Five years later, it is clear that, in this, he was wrong. Yes, there is increasing radicalisation. Yes, a new and powerfully globalised ”Muslim” identity is spreading, aided by communications technology that renders national frontiers obsolete. Yes, there is a small, if growing, number of Muslims who are attracted to ”al-Qaedaism” in its largest sense. But the truth is that out of a total of 1,6-billion Muslims, very few have joined terrorist organisations.
In countries that have suffered violence, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq, there has been a strong counter-reaction to the atrocities of recent years. The number of young men attracted by violence in the UK is larger than it was a decade ago, but is still statistically insignificant. If bin Laden’s ”awakening” has started, it is taking a long time. The world’s Muslims are not behaving as bin Laden wants them to. They are behaving, still, as individuals. Militancy or, more often a lack of militancy, is still a personal and rational choice.
Analyses of modern Islamic militancy often focus on long-standing factors in the Islamic world or, more specifically, in the Middle East to explain the current violence. Others favour a local approach, highlighting problems on the ground in Kashmir, Algeria or the Philippines. Both approaches are useful, but there is one element that is often neglected.
Shortly after the bombings in London last year, I travelled to Pakistan. Using old contacts, I was able to travel into the off-limits tribal areas to interview a tribal chief with close links to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Listening to his tirade against the West, it became clear that his primary ambition was to block the growing cohesion and interconnectivity of the modern world. For him, modernity meant ”moral corruption”, uncertainty, chaos, change and an end to his power and his way of life. Among his various enemies were internet cafes, satellite TV, cheap air travel and women’s education. In short, everything that he could not control.
The men who had struck in London on 7/7, though from very different origins, still had much in common with the tribal chief. Their targets were in King’s Cross, Edgware Road, Aldgate East and Tavistock Square, cosmopolitan areas in one of the most cosmopolitan cities on Earth. And the final sight that the young men would have seen was a tube or a bus full of individuals, of different races and religions, all getting on together and, through their co-existence, thriving.
The bombers knew that their act would force anyone aware of the attacks to choose between support and opposition. Their violence would create a complicity among perpetrators and their sympathisers and create solidarity among those who had been attacked. The violence of the 7/7 bombers, like that of bin Laden, aimed to construct barriers where they were breaking down, to create difference where difference was disappearing and to maintain distance where people were coming together. It is not for nothing that bin Laden has repeatedly demanded that Muslims ”define themselves”. The aim is to polarise the world into different, antagonistic blocks.
The 7/7 bombs were, thus, a strike against a continuing and largely successful process of integration on a national scale. The attacks across the world in the past five years are strikes against a similar process of integration on an international scale. This process is largely driven by the continuing popularity and attraction of the Western model of secular liberal democracy, Enlightenment values and capitalist economics. It is the success of this model that has provoked the violence against it, not its failure.
Yet before we start congratulating ourselves on the appeal of our way of life, we need to ask why so many people, from London to Bali, have recently come to view the apparently ineluctable process of Westernisation, though it offers so much that so many want, as a nightmare, not a dream. For them, Western society does not mean freedom, opportunity and progress, but the dissolution of identity, chaos, incertitude and loss. After all, the arithmetic of terrorism means that you only need a small shift in public opinion to create enough angry individuals to cause a major problem.
One answer is to be found in the conduct of ”the war on terror”. There have been many notable successes in recent years — the hard core of ”al-Qaeda” that existed in Afghanistan in the late 1990s has been dismantled and it is now immeasurably more difficult for militant cells to mount effective large-scale operations — but the ”collateral damage” of the conduct of the war on terror has been huge.
The appeal of the West is founded not just on a dream of a high level of material comfort but also on the satisfaction of basic and universal human values such as dignity, protection of life and justice. This gives the West considerable moral capital, but moral capital is a fragile commodity. This precious resource has been profligately spent in recent years. The fact that Abu Ghraib prison, where Saddam’s henchmen tortured and maimed at will, is now known for American abuse of prisoners is both a disgrace and a tragedy. The information gathered at Guantanamo Bay can in no way be equal in strategic value to the damage done to the image of America around the world. The south east of Afghanistan was an opportunity to demonstrate that the West is not, as we know it is not, engaged in a war against Islam. Instead, it was criminally neglected for four years and British soldiers and local people are paying the price.
A host of other policies and statements has so tarnished the image of America and her allies, particularly the UK, that democracy is now a dirty word in much of the Middle East. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Marx ceased to be a player, leaving the field free for Mohammad. In many places, Islamism is the only remaining ideology of opposition.
The situation is far from irredeemable. A recent poll in Egypt asked where people would most like to live and which country they most hated. The answer to both questions was, predictably, America. Europe, thrashing out a new modus vivendi for coming to terms with large Muslim minorities, has a key role to play in reconciling these two sentiments. But for all the clumsiness with which the misconceived ”war on terror” has been handled, the attraction, however conflicted, of ‘the West’ for billions of people remains our greatest strength.
Remember that and, over 10 or 20 years, it will become clear bin Laden’s life or death will indeed have no significance. He and his kind will have been consigned to the history books. – Guardian Unlimited Â