Автор: Patrick Cockburn
Название: ISIS: Battling the Menace
Издательство: Independent Print
Год: 2016
ISBN: 978-1633534353
Язык: English
Формат: pdf, epub
Размер: 18,9 mb
Страниц: 304
The spectacular resurgence of al-Qa'ida and its offshoots has happened despite the huge expansion of American and British intelligence services and their budgets after 9/11. Since then, the US, closely followed by Britain, has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and adopted procedures formerly associated with police states, such as imprisonment without trial, rendition, torture and domestic espionage. Governments justify this as necessary to wage the "war on terror", claiming that the rights of individual citizens must be sacrificed to secure the safety of all.
Despite these controversial security measures, the movements against which they are aimed have not only not been defeated but have grown stronger. At the time of 9/11, al-Qa'ida was a very small organisation, but in 2014 al-Qa'ida-type groups are numerous and powerful. In other words, the "war on terror", the waging of which determined the politics of so much of the world since 2001, has demonstrably failed.
How this failure happened is perhaps the most extraordinary development of the 21st century. Politicians were happy to use the threat of al-Qa'ida to persuade people that their civil liberties should be restricted and state power expanded, but they spent surprisingly little time calculating the most effective practical means to combat the movement. They have been able to get away with this by giving a misleading definition of al-Qa'ida, which varied according to what was politically convenient at the time.
This book shows that the "war on terror" has failed because it did not target the jihadi movement as a whole and, above all, was not aimed at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries that had fostered jihadism as a creed and a movement. And because the US, with Britain never far behind, refused to break with these two Sunni powers, jihadism survived and prospered after 9/11.