Twin Towers and terrorism: the impact 10 years on

Twin Towers and terrorism: the impact 10 years on | Jason Burke/Francis Fukuyama | Comment is free | The Observer

It was the day that changed the world for ever. Or did it? Ten years on, two leading commentators, Jason Burke and Francis Fukuyama, offer an analysis of its long-term impact, and how terrorism works

Francis Fukuyama: The legacy of that terrible time will be less significant than we then feared

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, there were grand assertions that "everything was different" and that the "world had changed." We were forced to confront a bearded man in a cave spouting incomprehensible invective about crusaders and jihad, and reorient foreign policy in dramatic ways. But with 10 years' hindsight, did the world actually change on that date? And what will Osama bin Laden's historical legacy be?

The answer to both questions is: not much. It is my view that in a longer historical perspective, al-Qaida will be seen as a mere blip or diversion. Bin Laden got lucky that day and pulled off a devastating, made-for-media attack. The United States then overreacted, invading Iraq and making anti-Americanism a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But while al-Qaida's form of radical Islamism appealed to a minority of discontented individuals, it never represented a dominant social trend in the Middle East. The broader and more important story that was emerging in the past decade was the social modernisation of the Arab world that has resulted in the Arab Spring.

People could be excused for thinking that the world had changed after September 11. The World Trade Centre attacks involved the killing of innocent people for its own sake, a nihilistic act that could have claimed the lives of 10 or 100 times as many victims, had the technological means been available. The threat of weapons of mass destruction had been around for a long time, but up until that point no one seemed malevolent enough to use them in this fashion. In the days after the attacks, every thoughtful person began to realise how vulnerable modern technological societies were.

It turned out, however, that once the world's intelligence and security establishment was turned to focus on the problem of Islamist terrorism, it was possible to mount a defence. The fact that there have been no follow-up attacks on American soil was not for want of trying; but many plots were uncovered and broken up before they could be realised. The truly frightening possibility remains terrorist access to nuclear or biological weapons, but the route to these capabilities is not so easy for groups like al-Qaida and its affiliates.

The real problem was political. As the terrorism expert Brian Jenkins points out, democratic publics always overreact to the threat of terrorism. It would have been very difficult for an American administration of any stripe to tell the public the truth after September 11, namely, that western civilisation was not facing an existential threat from al-Qaida, but rather a long twilight struggle best fought by police and intelligence agencies.

The Bush administration did much the opposite, elevating the "war on terrorism" to the level of 20th-century struggles against fascism and communism, and justifying its invasion of Iraq on these grounds. By neglecting Afghanistan and occupying Iraq, it turned both countries into magnets for new terrorist recruitment, diminished its own moral stature through prisoner abuse, and tarnished the name of democracy promotion.

September 11 spawned many theories of a Muslim or Arab exception to the global trend toward democracy. After the green uprising in Iran and the Arab Spring, we can see clearly that this was one area where the Bush administration was right: there was no cultural or religious obstacle to the spread of democratic ideas in the Middle East; only, it would have to come about through the people's own agency and not as a gift of a foreign power. Even if democracy does not emerge quickly in places such as Egypt and Tunisia, the popular mobilisation we have seen signals a key social trend far more powerful than anything a Bin Laden or Zawahiri could muster.

September 11 will have legacies. Al-Qaida and its affiliates continue to operate, and may still succeed in downing an airliner or exploding a car bomb in a shopping mall. Pakistan, with its stockpile of nuclear weapons, is a very scary place, the one part of the Muslim world where trends have been going in the wrong direction. In western countries, distrust of Muslims has grown since 9/11, as evidenced by the controversy of the so-called "Ground Zero" mosque in the US or the rising of anti-immigrant populist parties in Europe. All of this will make the already difficult integration of immigrant communities much more difficult to accomplish.

Since 2001 the most important world-historical story has been the rise of China. This is a development whose impact will almost certainly be felt in 50 years' time. Whether anyone will remember Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida at that remove is a different matter.

Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford University, and author of The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Profile).

Jason Burke: Terrorists are made by local experience, not grand ideology

In all the breathless statements by rebels over recent weeks in Libya, one in particular contained a few simple words that explained much of the violence in many conflicts over recent years. Why are you fighting, a young man outside Tripoli was asked by a reporter. Because his father and brother had been imprisoned by Gaddafi earlier this year, the rebel said, and so he was at war to set them free.

The rebel campaign in Libya is very different from many others that we have seen in recent years. Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia and the terrorism in the west and elsewhere have all had their own specific qualities. There is, however, one common element among all these conflicts. It is that those engaged in them are very rarely fighting for big ideas or ideologies.

They may invoke concepts of global jihad or talk of civilisational clashes or human rights and democracy in their propaganda but the reasons that they are holding a weapon are usually much more mundane. Those reasons are to be found in the experience of the individual, not the mass generalities of the crowd; in the particular not the general. This helps us understand not just the nature of modern militancy, but the nature of these wars and of the world that has produced them.

Interviewing militants is often a depressing experience. Frequently ignorant and uninformed, their world view is composed of a mix of repetitive stereotypes, conspiracy theories, prejudices and misunderstanding. But the stories of how they were drawn into violence are always interesting. Take Didar, a failed suicide bomber in Iraq, whom I interviewed in the summer of 2002. He had no grand explanation for why he had ended up with explosives around his waist heading into a police office. He simply said that he had followed a friend who persuaded him to go on "an adventure" to a training camp and that one thing led to another. Abit, an impressionable baker's son from a small town in Pakistan, ended up in a Taliban training camp for similar reasons.

Again and again the testimony of European militants – a group of London and Luton-based militants active in 2004, Belgians and French from 2008, a German militant who returned from Pakistan last year – stresses not ideology but small group dynamics. One spoke of the "camaraderie" of frontline fighting with the Taliban. The 9/11 hijackers were famously, and accurately, described as "a bunch of guys" by a German prosecutor. In 2005 I investigated a mass suicide attack in southern Thailand in which a dozen young men died. The only link between them was that they were all part of the same football team.

This shouldn't necessarily surprise us. Terrorism is a social activity and the path into violence is determined by social interaction as much as any political or religious programme. The question to ask about radicalisation is therefore not "who?" and still less "why?", but "how?". Security services like MI5 have now adapted profiling to focus on networks and processes, not characteristics that supposedly render an individual vulnerable. Families including existing or former militants are of a particular interest. American officials in Iraq say that the main predictor of extremism is having a brother active in extremism or in prison.

Another element, now emerging from Libya, is the importance of local specificity. There are three groups of rebels in Libya, each with their own characteristics and each from a different part of the country. The dynamic between these groups will determine how the situation evolves, not big ideas.

Indeed, over recent years, "the local" has trumped "the global" every time in terms of influence on the evolution of events. Excepting a small number of spectacular headline strikes such as the 9/11 operation itself, the vast proportion, 95% perhaps, of violent attacks have occurred within a couple of hours' travel, at most, from where the perpetrators lived or grew up. The 7/7 bombers travelled no more than a couple of hours by train. Those responsible for attacks in Madrid in March 2004 were living in a rundown district only a mile or so from the station where most of their victims died. 80% of Taliban militants killed or captured in Afghanistan are within 15 miles of their homes, at least according to US military intelligence officers I spoke to in Kabul in June.

The greatest weakness of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida and its ideology was its failure to respect cultural difference. Al-Qaida speaks Arabic. Only about a third of the world's Muslims do. Al-Qaida wants a new Muslim caliphate to replace modern states. But most people from Morocco to Malaysia are attached to their nations – as recent flag-waving protests have shown. Why did the tribes of western Iraq turn against al-Qaida in 2005 and 2006? Because they no longer thought that the foreign brand of extremism and the particularly unpleasant people who were propagating it served their communities' – and their own – interests. So they switched sides and al-Qaida in Iraq was finished.

The tension between local identities and global ideologies is most clearly seen with reactions to terrorist violence in the Islamic world over the last decade. Condoning bombings a long way away is much easier than supporting someone planting IEDs on your street.

Backing violence is easier when it stays virtual. In country after country across the Muslim world, support for Bin Laden and his tactics collapsed when attacks started close to home. In Jordan, it dropped from 57% before bloody attacks on hotels in November 2005 to under 20% in their immediate aftermath. The same phenomenon was seen elsewhere.

What is the overall lesson? The last decade has shown us that our western confidence in globalisation and the convergence of cultures and communities was vastly exaggerated. Communities everywhere are much more parochial, more limited, more resistant to outside influence than ideologues of all kinds would like. Local identities, customs, cultures, ties of blood and shared values are still much more important than any supposed convergence of lifestyles. Yes, there are global economic flows and everyone can hum the soundtrack of Titanic. Yes, there are enthusiastic demands for democracy and rights of free expression or association. But these do not determine why people take up guns. A chaotic, fast-evolving and complex world without overarching narratives generates conflicts in its own image.

Politics and war remain local. When it comes to why people take up arms, for whatever purpose, there are no global rules, only individuals.

Jason Burke's new book The 9/11 Wars is published by Penguin