Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam

"Burke is one of the leading foreign correspondents in the world. He was posted in Pakistan and spent a lot of time in Iraq. This is a very deeply reported book but I don’t agree with its analysis of Al-Qaeda’s structure. Burke sees Al-Qaeda as more of a disorganised movement, which grew up organically in Afghanistan. I think that that is incorrect. Just to give you one example, a draft of Al-Qaeda’s bylaws runs to 36 pages in English. So Al-Qaeda was, in fact, bureaucratised. As a tactic it’s been successful but I think it can be overused. If the success of the drone programme means that we have 180 million people in Pakistan who are irate at the United States that seems like a high price to pay. The drone programme pisses off Pakistanis across the ideological spectrum. This is about their national sovereignty and the perception that these attacks kill many civilians, which is not very true. If Canada was routinely killing mafia members in Buffalo, New York, there would be some Americans who would be pissed off that Canada was invading our air space. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Leftists in the United States and elsewhere have been surprisingly muted about the drone programme. I think there’s a pretty simple reason for that. There was a great deal of human outcry about a lack of due process at Guantanamo. There’s no greater lack of due process than for the Obama administration to act as judge and juror and just kill militants. There’s a cognitive dissonance about Obama and his embrace of covert power, whether it’s drones or Special Forces or cyber attacks. It’s a very complicated question because some of the people killed in these were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Pakistanis. I think there is an argument to be made for judicious use of drones, particularly when they’re in the common interest of Pakistan and the United States. The counter-argument is that we’re creating a precedent that other countries will feel justified in following. It won’t be long before we have several countries that have armed drones and that could be something we come to rue. He undoubtedly changed history to some degree. Certainly 9/11 had a broad effect on the United States, and through that Afghanistan and Iraq. But the further we get away from the event, the more we can see that Bin Laden’s ideas were not widely accepted in the Muslim world. It was telling that the protests that marked Bin Laden’s death were incredibly small. He became more irrelevant over time. His ideas were proved to be wanting. He had a negative agenda, and no agenda on how to deal with political and economic problems of the Arab world. One of the points I make in my book, Manhunt, is that 9/11 appeared to be the beginning of something – the beginning of Al-Qaeda’s assault on the West which would change the world. But in fact it was really the climax of Al-Qaeda’s activity. It was a kamikaze attack by Al-Qaeda that essentially destroyed their base – and Al-Qaeda means “the base”. The goal of getting the United States out of the Middle East didn’t happen. Quite the reverse. 9/11 was Osama’s Pearl Harbor – a victory that led to strategic defeat."

"He’s a great writer and his other book, On The Road to Kandahar , is really good too. He was one of the only journalists who, right from the beginning, were saying: hang on a minute. It’s not that simple. What he does in this book is explain the history and significance of al Qaeda and the motives of those attracted to its violent ideology. Again, he was one of the earliest people doing this and it’s a very deep analysis and understanding drawn from an interaction with the people. That comes across in the book very, very well. I think to try to understand it is not necessarily to condone it. In order to defeat something you have to understand it. He doesn’t do the machismo thing – this is an analysis based on personal experience and there are personal anecdotes in the book but it’s restrained and presciently written. He argues that al Qaeda isn’t a structured terrorist organisation. It’s a core of bin Laden and his closest supporters, then the wider network and then the ideology of it, of freeing Muslim lands and cleansing a corrupt world through violence. The last is the key thing he explores, and he presents bin Laden, in part, as this important countercultural symbol like a Che Guevara for the Middle East, representing the discourse of dissent for some young Muslims. This is how he is viewed by some people. The other thing he does is he explores the West’s misunderstanding of Islamic militancy and the fact that it is very diverse with lots of different local manifestations. The focus of America on al Qaeda is a distraction from examining why people are attracted to this kind of ideology."