Old bottle, new wine
A well-researched account of the bloody decade that followed 9/11
By Aamir Riaz
A well-researched account of the bloody decade that followed 9/11
By Aamir Riaz
The 9/11 Wars
By Jason Burke
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2011
Pages: 709
Price: Rs 1095
Eight days before his departure as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of United States, Michael Mullen got unprecedented news coverage by issuing a controversial statement to the media about ISI’s involvement with the Haqqani network.
In Pak-US relations, Mullen’s statement will be remembered as playing to the gallery, a usual style of officers posted in hard areas. August 2011, a month when US Senate confirmed his retirement, was the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the recent conflict began. Mullen was among those officers the Obama administration inherited from the Bush administration, the initiator of the 9/11 wars.
During these 10 years a number of books have appeared on religious extremism and the post 9/11 scenario. The 9/11 Wars by Jason Burke, a British journalist who works for The Guardian and The Observer is one of them. Currently based in New Delhi, the author is supposed to be the first western journalist who interviewed Pervez Musharraf in October 1999.
But Burke ‘s credentials are not that ordinary, for one, Burke quite literally wrote the book on bin Laden — copies of his 2003 volume Al-Qaeda, were standard reading for coalition commanders in Iraq as they struggled to understand why people were blowing themselves up around them. And as one of the Observer’s longest-serving foreign correspondents, he has rich experience of the places he is talking about, be it Kurdistan, Waziristan, Kandahar or Fallujah
Burke tries to unfold gaps and slip-ups in US policy during the last 10 years of 9/11 Wars. For all Burke’s ground-level eye, however, this is as much a book of scholarship as reportage, deftly analysing the shortcomings of both the bin Laden and the Bush camps, no doubt, the last 200 pages section of notes and references is worth reading as it is deluged by inside information, normally inaccessible by readers.
The author criticises the beginning of the Iraq war which segregated the priorities set by 9/11 syndrome. “By April, May 2002, we began losing people to the groups that were preparing for the Iraq war,’said Mike Scheuer. Bob Grenier, the then head of Islamabad CIA station, remembered that a large number of the best and most experienced people were drawn off pretty early from Afghanistan and switched to Iraq, especially those with extensive counter-terrorism experience or regional specialties”. Ron Nash, the British ambassador in Afghanistan in the autumn 2003 also recorded his reservations regarding withdrawal of experience officers from Afghanistan while Art Keller, a CIA counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation specialist called that act as ‘the scraping of the barrel’. “Obama too used this argument against Bush administration during his election campaign which served as the core criticism on the 9/11 wars.
Burke has done some exhaustive reporting in The 9/11 Wars, but obviously there is a bias involved and he seems to sometimes miss the big picture altogether, such as till October 2007, US officials in Islamabad had confirmed in front of Burke that Pakistan has no links with rogue Taliban. Burke not only confirmed agenda-driven Afghan government reports against Pakistan’s support to Taliban as inconclusive but also pin-pointed Indian involvement in Afghan affairs yet limited himself not to comment on regional or international interests in or around Pak-Afghan borders.
Burke also tries to fix 9/11 syndrome with rise of new urban middle classes , from Morocco to Malaysia yet ignores religious-sectarian groups as political weapons by superpowers in respective societies to fulfil their foreign policy initiatives.
The 9/11 Wars is available at Readings
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