The 9/11 Wars

by Jason Burke

Burke, Jason

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Middle East, Terrorism, War, Politics, Military History

752 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2011

About the author

Jason Burke (born 1970) is a British journalist and the author of several non-fiction books. A correspondent covering Africa for The Guardian, he is currently based in Johannesburg, having previously been based in New Delhi as the same paper's South Asia correspondent.

Reviews

[Matt]

“[The 9/11 Wars] existed on multiple levels. At the local level, they were a mass of private battles, fratricidal skirmishes, communal clashes, often sparked by specific incidents of misgovernance or injustice, some pitting village against village, neighborhood against neighborhood, tribe against tribe. At the next level, the wars were often about the participation of a particular group in politics at a provincial or national level. Frequently they involved conflicts about the definition of a certain ethnic or religious group’s position within a state. Only at the final level, the biggest in scale, could some of these conflicts be integrated into an overarching cosmic conflict pitting the West and its allies against radical Islam. Each level provided a different prism through which the overall conflict could be seen. Not all were equally valid…”
- Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars

Recently, while resetting some login information on my computer, I had to choose a security question. Upon clicking the dropdown menu, the first option grabbed my attention: “Where were you on September 11?” At first I thought this a rather dark way to retrieve a forgotten password. After a moment’s reflection, though, I realized its aptness. Not only do I recall the city and state in which I was located, but I remember with stark clarity the room in which I stood, the people I was with, and the feelings that I felt.

Less easy to recall is all the violence that followed. Over the course of twenty-five years, it became hard to keep straight all the invasions and battles; all the color-coded alerts; all the suicide bombings; all the death. For those of us in the United States, encouraged to simply go on with our capitalist selves, it was even possible to ignore the force projected in our names.

Quite unlike the ongoing debate about Vietnam, the post-September 11 wars on terror have slipped into a weird memory hole. Those who started them walked away without accountability. The politicians who voted for them have never paid any price. It is only those survivors directly impacted who have to live with the consequences, and they mostly do so offstage.

In this setting of forgetting, Jason Burke’s The 9/11 Wars is a valuable book, even if it only covers the first decade of the West’s Middle Eastern misadventures.

***

Burke explains upfront that his is a work of journalism rather than history. By this he means that much of it is based on his own reporting and experiences in war zones. Of course, the line between journalism and history is fuzzy, especially since journalism becomes history with time. Given that The 9/11 Wars was published in 2011 – in a world quite unlike the one we now inhabit – that is important to remember.

More to the point, coherency requires Burke to discuss the decisions of policymakers and the wide-angled context. While he centers the ground-level experiences, he is unable to entirely ignore those at the top.

Really, the only thing that makes this feel like journalism is the fact that it ends with the wheel still spinning. When the final page comes, the Arab Spring has just started, ISIS has not yet been born, and a red-tide of death has not yet been unleashed across Syria, Lebanon, and Libya.

***

Despite covering only half of the tale, The 9/11 Wars is a big book, coming in at over 500 pages of text. This material is amplified by over 100 pages of annotated endnotes. Taken together, it makes for an ambitious scope.

In terms of coverage, Burke begins with the immediate response to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, and ends with the death of bin Laden in 2011, a killing both meaningful and entirely devoid of meaning. This decade is divided into six large sections that break up the material both chronologically and geographically.

The main areas of operations are Afghanistan and Iraq, and Burke spends a great deal of time toggling back and forth between the two, relating the now-well-known saga of how the administration of George W. Bush squandered any chance for success in the former by needlessly invading the latter. He describes in some detail the initial thrashing of the Taliban and its subsequent comeback; the initial successes in Iraq, which then broke down along sectarian lines; the creation of numerous splinter terror groups; and the troop surges that temporarily staved off disaster.

Beyond these obvious locales, Burke’s narrative covers the war’s spread to Europe and Asia, particularly the bombings in Madrid, London, and Mumbai. In addition, he follows the trail into Pakistan, and especially its Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Reading this felt like a bizarro trip down memory lane. It is a sensation of anti-nostalgia that honestly requires a long German word. Everything Burke touches on is something I had once read about in isolation. The value here is the way he puts all the pieces together into a whole.

***

With the rubble of the Twin Towers sill smoldering, President Bush’s first instinct was to claim that “freedom” had been attacked on September 11. As Burke notes, this represented an appeal to a cosmic view of the war as a clash of civilizational ideals with little basis in fact. From the moment the British Navy switched from coal to oil, the West has interfered with the lives tens of millions of Middle Easterners. This interference has embraced colonization, the redrawing of territorial boundaries, the exploitation of natural resources, the toppling of chosen leaders, the propping up of totalitarian governments, and numerous military interventions from cruise missile attacks and drone strikes to full-scale boot-on-the-ground invasions.

For over a century before September 11, 2001, the West had given the Middle East plenty of reasons to grieve. Burke takes the time to make this clear by interviewing Iraqi fighters, members of the Taliban, would-be suicide bombers, and ordinary civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. When time is taken to listen to their voices, you learn they mostly wanted to be left alone.

With that said, Burke is not under no illusion that the Middle East is merely an Eden corrupted by the West. It is a lot more complicated than that. Nevertheless, it becomes abundantly clear as one proceeds through these pages that the local fissures between the various tribal units of Afghanistan or the different religious strains in Iraq were never going to be solved by simply overlaying Western-style democracy onto ancient cultures and beliefs.

***

A quarter century later, the images and the sounds of September 11 can still sock the breath from your lungs. Younger generations understand the livestreaming of death; back then, it all seemed very new. To watch people die on your television screens. To see them jump and fall for so, so long. To hear their last words recorded on calls to emergency services. To listen to the oral histories painstakingly collected. To experience a grief that lasts forever.

Everyone who died on that distant Tuesday morning have been remembered in some way. Many received the full-scale obituaries usually reserved for the wealthy, the powerful, and the famous. There is a beautiful museum dedicated to the horrible day they went to work and were murdered.

But the killing of innocents did not end. Quite to the contrary, it intensified in the decades that followed. Under a banner filled with empty slogans, and for reasons often predicated on absolute falsehoods, America unleashed a response that directly killed around 250,000 thousand civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. Very few of those people received a detailed obituary in the West. None got a museum. Yet those individuals were no less innocent, were no less complex, were no less worthy than those who the United States justly celebrates. As Burke notes near the end of The 9/11 Wars, most of the dead will not be remembered at all.

In this failure – or refusal – to humanize those killed in the Middle East, we have our explanation as to why this all began in the first place.

[Kevin]

Although Burke is a Middle East correspondent for the notoriously lefty "Guardian," this book is all realpolitic, the war on terror shorn of all ideological lens. Most other books on the "9/11 Wars" (his neologism) -- Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo, etc. -- suffer from being either overly ideological or too mired in the first person of their author. Burke avoids all this, in fact, when he must refer to himself, he does so in the third person, "the author."

Relatedly, the refreshing thing about this book is, unlike so many other conflicts, Burke sees the series of wars and conflicts the past decade as mainly about local conditions rather than some sweeping, all-encompassing global narrative of the West against terror, freedom fighters versus imperialism, etc.

And, although he doesn't exactly anticipate the Arab Spring, he see it's likely results: Arab democracy that is deeply conservative, anti-west, to varying degrees, and anti-semitic. Does this trump west-supported dictators? That's the ultimate question.

[Khalid]

In one word - wow!

Jason Burke's book is an amazing compilation of facts that led up to and integrated into the War on Terror. Being a former journalist, Jason is able to go places where the regular author isn't and his volumes of facts and personalities is just mind-blowing. I picked this book up at the airport as research for a fictional novel that I am working on and found myself highlighting sections of information that I had heard in rumors and newspaper stories. He has brought a great deal of detail to each of his encounters and expanded the background so that the reader is better able to understand what went wrong and why.

This is an must read for anyone who wants to understand the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and why neither has delivered the results that were expected.

[Joe]

The last ten years of world affairs and public life sit in marked contrast to the 1990s. The world after the collapse of communism and before 9/11 now looks like a sort of Edwardian calm before the storm. With the exception of a very nasty war in the former Yugoslavia, to which most of us turned a blind eye, the pressing issues of the day seemed to revolve around what the US president did or didn’t do with an intern in the Oval office. It could be just the product of a misplaced nostalgia (which often kicks in after 10 years), but that decade now looks rather carefree in comparison to what came after.

It seems to me that in public affairs the years since 2001 have been marked by a sense of gloom or weight. Of course it all began with outright fear and shock and by turns went through different phases (often overlapping) of paranoia, hate, mendacity, reaction, prejudice, self censorship, over theorising and shrill moralising. There was also a feeling of the world going back to concerns and issues that should have been put to bed a long time ago, such as the sudden reappearance of religion in public life in the West as an overriding concern.

When I was a first year undergraduate at the end of 1980s, studying history, I took a course on the early church. I remember quite clearly that I and others had difficulty getting our heads around why people might come to blows over whether one made the sign of the cross with two or three fingers. Of course I realise now that my incredulity then was just a kind of secular innocence and that since then one has become hyper alert to religious symbolism and sensibilities.

The other gloomy regression has been the re-emergence of torture by, or on behalf of the West. After the enlightenment, then various rounds of colonial nastiness, nationalism, Nazism, communism etc we were supposed to be beyond this, but then linear progress would appear to be an illusion. Occasional improvements with regressive hiccups may be the best we can hope for.

The other difficulty of the last ten years has been to try and make sense of events as they pepper you from newspapers, TV and the internet. In this book Jason Burke seems to have gone some of the way in doing that. By providing a narrative and cutting through a lot of the analytical and theoretical cant from the pundits, politicians and instant experts it seems the 9/11 wars (as he calls them) can now be placed in some kind of context and like the cold war era can be seen as something of a passing phase, rather than an unending blueprint for the future.

The clear message from this book is the frequent incompatibility of global ideology and local concerns. This is most starkly illustrated in Iraq where a neo-liberal American philosophy of democratization and free markets has been rejected. But then so has Bin Laden’s vision of global struggle; neatly illustrated by the Kuwaiti Jihadi who told an Iraqi it was un-Islamic to pray at his local shrine and was shot for his troubles.

If like me you want to take stock of the insanity of the last ten years and start putting those events in a box then this is a good place to start. Besides, we now have an economic crisis of terrifying proportions to occupy our attention.

[Abhineet Singh]

The book authors a different viewpoint about the events post 9/11, and tried to present them in a broader narrative. It explains the difference between the zealous narrative fed by the mainstream media and the actual ground reality. How various factors led to radicalisation and how this is due to a mix of multiple factors like local issues, ethnic fault lines, religious outlook, lack of proper education, and corruption. It also highlights how the one size fits all approach will not work to counter such radicalisation.

The thinking that western values of democracy, liberty, equality, secularism, etc. will be accepted across the globe, especially if they are forced from the top, is a fallacy. The lack of a ground level approach to development and cooperation is the prime reason for the failure of 9/11 wars to fundamentally change the situation. The hard hitting approach of President Bush was as stupid as the religious fanaticism of the terrorists. No one will achieve their objectives if the core of the problem is not addressed.

What is not discussed in the book is the fundamental role of Islam and its role in the radicalisation of people. The author generally mentions that the people in the Middle East hate western values, hate America, hate secularism, etc. but no effort is made to understand why all these hatred flows from the teachings of Islam (which might be distorted by radical mullahs with the support of the government like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan). It is these events which provide fodder to the terrorist churning factories which are adept at exploiting the ethnic divisions, lack of purpose, unemployment, sexual frustrations, and so on.

Until a fundamental change is made in the way Quranic values are being interpreted by mullahs around the world, with the active support of government, terrorism will keep on rising again and again. The lack of participative local government and promoting grass roots education are a must to counter this trend. The rise of ISIS explains how the 9/11 wars have merely subdued the trend, not curved it.

The role is Pakistan and KSA needs to be fundamentally looked by the world to counter terrorism. One provides the foot soldiers and the other provides the funding.

The book has very sensible arguments about the role of zealot ideology and the role of positive forces. The minuscule number of radicalised Muslims in Europe is a testament to this trend. (2025 update: radical Islam has emerged as a fundamental challenge to the European way of life). Guess my initial assessment that Islam is the root cause of such problems still remains unresolved.

Overall, this is a good book as it tries to look at the events from a unique point of view.

[Peter Thomas]

Jason Burke gives a real insight to world political mismanagement of complicated local issues. Our leaders have learnt nothing from history and keep making the same mistakes as their predecessors.
Radicalisation of Islam is often the root cause of current conflicts and only by reviewing the teachings of the Koran by more worldly, conservative clerics at grass roots level will help alleviate the situation.

[James]

Really strong analysis and deep review of the multiple stories, cultures and people who participated in and were victims of the decade after 9/11. The world is a complex place, and it’s far too easy to generalize and so misunderstand.

[Li Zheng]

an absolute page-tunner. packed with ground details, stories and macro brisk perspectives. marked for further reading.

[Lasith Ranasinghe]

Interesting exploration of the fall out from 9/11. It explores the rise of radical Islam and the western response.

[Matthew]

Burke has been everywhere and spoken to everyone (I switched from hardcover to kindle just to make turning to the footnotes easier), and has written a remarkable first draft of the history of modern times. He gives perfunctory treatment to the military campaigns (the Iraq invasion is dealt with in a page). The book instead delineates the national, sectarian and tribal fault lines that were so violently exposed in the wake of 9/11, and the tragedy of the West's profound inability to parse them.

I disagree, however, with Burke's conclusion:

"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."

An incomplete list of waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, security theatre, habeas corpus, Samina Manik, DNA databases and 90 day detention is enough to demonstrate how completely we have lost our bearings.

The book summarised in a quote:

"Watching a patrol of heavily armed UK soldiers plod down a back lane in Lashkar Gah, where the coalition force in Helmand had its headquarters, one elderly man told the author that the British were the twelfth fighting force he had seen from the gate of his compound in the last twenty years. (The others were, in reverse historical order, Americans, the Taliban, at least four warring mujahideen groups, Soviet troops and Afghan government soldiers from three different regimes.) 'They always arrive noisily saying they will win but leave much more quietly,' he added and shrugged."

[Simon Koefman]

Burke picks up where he left off in Al Qaeda, taking us on a chronological tour of the major arenas of radical Islam -Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Burke speaks to hundreds of people from all sides involved in the conflict and this gives the work credibility and authority. He is balanced and objective at all times; shows how instead of a single monolithic bloc Radical Islam is a diverse phenomenon influenced locally by cultural and socio economic factors. The book also cover the impact of radical Islam on Muslim communities within Europe, showing that protests and violence were often influenced by economic deprivation, unemployment etc. The timing of the book is poignant, it was published shortly after the start of the Arab spring in 2011. Demonstrating that bottom-up "people power " was able to do in a matter of weeks what Al Qaeda had failed to do in ten years and depose corrupt, venal regimes. Overall an excellent , authoritative work .Highly recommended.

[Simon Harvey]

Given the sprawling subject matter that Burke attempts to cover herein, the book is necessarily more an overview than a truly in-depth account of any particular aspect of the various fronts (Afghanistan, Iraq, Bali, Chechnya, Palestine, Mumbai, the slums of western Europe) at which radical Islam and the rest of the world have clashed since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, it's a consistently engaging, often insightful volume that manages to pack a lot of history into a manageable narrative. That narrative continues to unfold still, with events breaking daily, so it will be interesting to check back in another decade and see how Burke's cautiously optimistic take circa mid 2011 looks in hindsight.

[Mike]

Fascinating overview of a set of incredibly complex and diffuse conflicts that originate or escalate from the 9/11 attacks. The range of interviewees is excellent, people at every level give their perspectives on the fighting. Burke's qualified optimism at the close of this book looks a little dated with the chaos in Iraq/Syria and the rise of IS, but anyone interested in the roots of the various regional and global crises currently so prominent in the news should give this a read.

[Michael]

Could just as easily be entitled 'Conflict is Complex' - it highlights how the aphorism that 'all politics is local' applied to the major areas of conflict in the series of wars stretching from 9/11 to the present. I learned a bit about all of the theaters, but especially about Pakistan. No easy resolutions on the horizons, though.

[Antony]

A definitive account of our last decade

[Steve]

Brilliant!

[Matt Ely]

A quick read, but thematically unerwhelming when compared to similar stuff like Accidental Guerilla

[Ankit]

Good book for ppl looking for in-depth analysis on the topic..as such its not a breezy read or full of suspense but detailed, verbose and at a slow pace. Its a piece of amazing research..

[Hamda]

Explained everything that needs to be said.

[Paul Danahar]

Great book.