“Few events can be as debilitating as a great victory,” wrote the eminent liberal Israeli journalist Amos Elon in his 1971 book, The Israelis. Elon was referring to the Six-Day War of 1967, which gave Israel control of the West Bank, Gaza, and other territories. Israelis rejoiced, unaware that they had been given a poisoned chalice. America’s victory in the Cold War in 1989 followed a similar pattern: when Communist regimes in Eastern Europe suddenly collapsed one after another, followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, America and its policy elite basked in triumphalism, seeing democracy as the natural order of things to come. The war in Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda in the Nineties did not shatter the smug belief in a linear direction of historical Progress entertained by the powers-that-be; both events were horrific, but they were localized. Convinced that no geopolitical threats existed anymore, America sold its military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo as a new kind of war, whose goal was purely humanitarian. Such was the misleading effect of the victory in the 44-year-long Cold War.

The realization that the end of the Cold War had given us not peace, but an even more dangerous and far more unstable world occurred in stages. And 9/11 was the first shock, magnified by the technology of television, which repeatedly showed the twin towers in lower Manhattan collapsing into a fiery pile of dust and rubble. The event hit Americans, lulled into the complacency of the Nineties, with the psychological force of Pearl Harbor, to which it was repeatedly compared. But when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 the world was already at war. The Nazis had already occupied France, and were at the gates of Moscow. The Japanese had already invaded China and committed the Rape of Nanjing. Thus, for Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare war on the Axis Powers was not only the right thing to do, but also the natural thing.

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By Robert D. Kaplan

The direction of history after the attacks of 9/11 was not so clear. The world was otherwise at peace. The Chinese were still in the early phase of building a great navy, around which their military capability would be oriented. Moreover, China was still governed by the reformer Jiang Zemin, a leader friendly to the United States. Vladimir Putin had been in power less than two years and was still consolidating control. It was unclear in what direction he would take Russia. Great power conflict was the furthest thing from people’s minds.

And so, with China and Russia out of the mental picture, the public debate went from unreflectively assuming democracy was about to overtake the world to falling in line behind the Global War on Terrorism. In this way, 9/11 was incorporated into post-Cold War triumphalism. Indeed, as 9/11 had demonstrated, and as the conventional thinking went, the Arab world was politically sick, and the cure was to bring democracy to the greater Middle East.

The administration of President George W. Bush was actually slow to come to this conclusion. Caught off guard by the devastating attacks of 9/11, the Bush White House, burdened by guilt and thus determined that no chances could be taken in protecting American security, immediately conceived of a war to topple the Afghan regime of the Taliban, the hosts of the 9/11 killers. Two months after the attacks, the US military and its Afghan allies occupied the Afghan capital of Kabul. Victory had come easy, perhaps too easy, owing to an innovative, economy-of-force strategy emphasizing special operations forces and local Afghan fighters. But again, without much reflection, rebuilding Afghanistan was turned over to the big, conventional US Army bureaucracy, whose conception of Afghanistan — despite inventive interludes under certain commanders — would turn out to be analogous to that of the Soviet occupiers in the Eighties, who themselves withdrew in defeat.

Because Afghanistan was too easy (as it was then thought), and 9/11 still reverberated in a loud, deafening manner, a bigger response was conceived: the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime in Iraq. After all, from a human rights perspective there was no worse regime in the world except for North Korea’s. And Bosnia and Kosovo had set the pattern for humanitarian interventions. As I can attest from reporting on the ground in the Middle East, Iraq back then was actually far more repressive than Iran, which had an element of democracy built into its theocratic system under the reformist president Mohammed Khatami, and more repressive even than fellow-Baathist Syria. Though the proof of Saddam aiding al-Qaeda was very flimsy at best, he was certainly supporting many other Arab terrorist groups. Then there was the issue of Iraq seeking a nuclear bomb, which not only the American intelligence community but other Western intelligence agencies assumed to be the case. This is not a defense of invading Iraq — a war I initially supported — merely an argument of how it was not outright madness to consider such an action in sequence, considering that China and Russia were not yet on the radar screen as great power threats, and 9/11 still overwhelmed the public debate.

History is ironic. Had 9/11 not occurred; had Saddam not acted like a guilty man, trying to convince the world that he had a nuclear program even though he didn’t; had the Bush administration’s guilt over 9/11 not led it to a take-no-chances approach in the Middle East, there likely never would have been an invasion of Iraq in the first place.

History is also governed by odd contingencies. Had several Arab armies not threatened Israel in the spring of 1967 — specifically, had King Hussein of Jordan heeded the many warnings not to open a military front against Israel in the West Bank — Israel would not have come into possession of an Arab population totaling 1.25 million at the time. The Jewish settlers’ movement never would have been born, forever deforming Israeli politics in the process. Egypt would have stayed stuck with ruling Gaza. And later on, Iran’s clerical regime, despite its hatred of Israel and the Jews, would have had much less propaganda material to work with. The results of the 1967 War could well be interpreted as a tragedy for Israel; just as the effect of 9/11 could be interpreted as a tragedy for the United States even beyond the initial, massive loss of life, spawning as it did a long and misconceived occupation of Afghanistan, followed by the disastrous war in Iraq.

The problem is that extremism can be emotionally satisfying, especially after a great event or catastrophe. Moderation does not do well when people are literally dancing in the street in Jerusalem like after the 1967 War, or baying for blood like after 9/11, or likewise after 7 October 2023 in Israel. Calls for regime change in Iraq or flattening Gaza appeal to the emotions and not to the intellect. That is their strength. The nuanced, middle-of-the-road technocrats and area specialists are at their weakest in such moments. The last American president who after a great, foreign outrage pursued limited objectives was the moderate conservative George H. W. Bush. Following Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked aggression of Kuwait in 1990, Bush decided to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi rule but otherwise leave Saddam in power and not invade Iraq, where America would likely have been bogged down for years to come. By saving his successor, President Bill Clinton, from this fate, Bush allowed Clinton to inherit a largely pacified geopolitical climate that, in turn, allowed Clinton to focus on humanitarian wars-of-choice in the former Yugoslavia. In fact, the relatively benign geopolitical climate bequeathed by the elder Bush was largely responsible for the naïve hubris of much of the American policy elite in the Nineties.

Remember that after the Napoleonic Wars, it was enlightened conservatives such as the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, the British statesman Viscount Castlereagh, and the French statesman Talleyrand who, by not pursuing extreme and vindictive solutions, however emotionally satisfying they would have been at the time, bought Europe almost a century of peace. Ironically, it was the assumption that peace was the natural order of things that led several great European powers to stumble naively into the First World War.

Similarly, the success of limited interventions in Panama in 1989, in Bosnia in 1995, and in Kosovo in 1999 allowed significant sectors of the American elite to believe in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that the US military could do anything in a world ordered to American goals and interests. It was this delusion that allowed the United States to stumble into Afghanistan and Iraq.

Beyond the gargantuan loss of life and treasure that the 9/11 wars cost the United States and the affected local populations, perhaps the greatest catastrophe was America’s grand strategic distraction while Russian and Chinese power grew exponentially. The decade of 9/11 wars was the decade when the Chinese military, especially its navy, unleashed its momentum of growth which continues to this day. Meanwhile, Putin consolidated his power in the Russian military and intelligence services, permitting him to rebuild the armed forces under virtual one-man rule for the first time since Stalin.

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The result of all this has not been pretty. Terrorism has certainly not been eliminated. As Joseph Conrad showed in The Secret Agent (1907), all it takes is an angry, politically motivated individual or two, burrowing in the heart of a city, anonymous to their neighbors, to perpetrate great atrocities. And great power conflict now exists alongside terrorism. Despite the attempts by middle-level powers to navigate between the United States and China and chart a course of their own, the very survival of the global system is now in jeopardy. This is the world that has followed what was believed to have been the triumphant end to the Cold War. And 9/11 was a crucial inflection point in this tragic process: distracting us when we should have been focused on Russia and China. It was indeed a great head fake.

Alas, there is no relief from history. The rise and fall of great powers is never-ending, and policymakers’ tragic mistakes are baked into the process. And while the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was avenged by the US victory over Japan in 1945, the United States is still searching for some sort of meaningful historical reply to 9/11 a quarter-century later. Indeed, our 9/11 wars, particularly in Iraq, only emboldened clerical Iran and enlarged its geopolitical footprint. The current war with Iran is part of the process that began with 9/11. The attacks brought us into a generational military struggle in the Middle East that shows no sign of abatement. And it isn’t only the Middle East’s inherent instability that is the problem, but our very obsession with it. Tragedy, as Shakespeare repeatedly shows, is borne of obsession.

Almost exactly five years earlier, on 15 August 2021, the Taliban seized this airport. Chaos ensued. The Americans carried out an 18-day operation in which more than 123,000 people were airlifted to safety — the largest non-combatant evacuation in U.S. military history. On 30 August, at 11:59pm local time, the final US military plane departed Kabul, one minute before President Joe Biden’s deadline for withdrawal.

The airlift marked the end of the American-Afghan state that was born in 2001, when the US, aiming to hunt down Osama bin Laden and overthrow his Taliban allies, invaded the country and installed a Western-style government. For 20 years, this US-backed state persisted, but its unraveling took mere weeks. Everything Washington had built in the country, notably a national army, proved to be a mirage that vanished in the face of a resurgent Taliban. The regime now celebrates 31 August as the day of liberation from US occupation. Each year, parades weave through Kabul’s central squares. Celebratory gunfire sounds across the city.

Today, the capital is a mix of urban squalor and state repression. Armed Talibs patrol the streets while beggar children work the traffic, tapping insistently at windows and thrusting out supplicant hands. On Chicken Street in the city center, homeless girls play beneath brightly colored shopfronts selling trinkets and carpets to a small but growing trickle of tourists. “Things are much safer now the Taliban are in control, and there is no war,” says a local who doesn’t wish to be named. “But we have lost a lot of freedoms. That is the bargain we now live under.”

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He’s right. The streets are calm. Taliban are polite – friendly even. But I am aware that this is a state beholden only to itself. People can, and are, regularly disappeared into its prisons and torture chambers without warning or due process.

Still, to understand the Taliban, you must understand where they come from. Kabul may be Afghanistan’s capital, but Kandahar, a city in the country’s south, is the Islamic Emirate’s spiritual and political center. Here its Supreme Leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, and his circle of advisers rule, largely hidden from public view. I make my way there down the  300-mile Kabul-Kandahar highway, which cuts through vast stretches of arid plateau and dust-blown steppe. I pass goat-hair tents belonging to Afghanistan’s semi-nomadic Kuchi people and flocks of threadbare sheep. Mud-brick villages whizz past, their flat roofs and earth-colored walls almost indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape.

As I approach the city’s outskirts, three small girls swing incense burners, sending coils of smoke billowing skyward. The ritual is said to keep away evil spirits. In the city center, the heat is intense. Taliban flags fly everywhere. Men swathed in black keffiyehs emerge through clouds of dust kicked up by their motorbikes. Women are begging in full burqas. The poverty of Kandahar, to say nothing of the theocratic intensity, makes Kabul look like San Francisco. I am told that photography is banned.

My first stop is the Ministry of Information and Culture, where I’m seeking permission to report in Kandahar. It’s roasting hot in the carpeted waiting room. In the corner, two men are carving up a huge melon. I am offered a glass jar of pear drops – the Taliban’s love of 1950s British sweets is one of the more surprising discoveries of my trip – and told that I’m in luck. A senior local official, Inamullah Samangani, has decided to grant me a spontaneous interview.

After a few minutes, I am summoned to an air-conditioned office next door. Four Talibs, one of whom is cradling an M16 rifle, are sitting barefoot on sofas. Cold melon and water are served to everyone. Samangani is an ethnic Tajik from the country’s north. He has a smooth, youthful face with a manicured mustache and tufty beard. He beams at me.

I ask him how he feels as the fifth anniversary approaches. “All our people are happy,” he replies. “This is what we wanted. After 20 years of war, this anniversary is very meaningful for us.”

What the Taliban want, he tells me, is peace and prosperity for the nation. “Afghanistan has been at war for more than 40 years. Afghanistan needs a great deal of rebuilding and construction, and we are working on this.”

What are the biggest challenges facing this new Islamic Emirate? “The situation is not normal because of the war and because of Western policies towards Afghanistan. The military war has ended, but an economic war continues. We want peace not only for Afghanistan but for our neighboring countries, the region and the world.”

I ask what he attributes the Taliban’s success to. “Our belief in Allah,” he replies without hesitation. “And our belief from the first day that we were on the right path. After September 11, when America and its allies occupied Afghanistan, we knew that freedom was our first and last choice. After 20 years, we achieved it.”

The interview ends; it’s clear that Samangani is more concerned with painting the Islamic Emirate as a reasonable partner with whom the international community can do business than getting into the realities of life here — and in this, he is like politicians everywhere. I make my way out of the office, passing a small room where a Talib is sitting on the floor, clipping his toenails.

Outside, armed men saunter in groups. Printed on a billboard overlooking a roundabout is a message from the Supreme Leader. “When you return from Hajj, don’t be wasteful by spending money on dinners and celebrations,” it warns.

The following morning, I set off from my guest house to meet Zabihullah Mujahid, chief spokesman for the Taliban government since 25 October 2021. He became a Taliban spokesman, and a senior government official, in January 2007, during the insurgency against the US-backed Afghan government. Even as he claimed responsibility on behalf of the Taliban for attacks on coalition forces, he remained faceless and pseudonymous. But on 17 August 2021, two days after Kabul fell, he revealed himself publicly. Now he is the regime’s international face.

For security reasons, I am not initially told Mujahid’s location. Instead, I am instructed to wait for a call. As I sit in a nearby cafe, my eyes scan the room until they settle on a pair of decorative screens. One depicts two camels, the other a peacock, the faces of all three creatures covered with stickers. I’m confused until I realize why: the defacing accords with the hadith-based injunction against complete representations of dhawāt al-arwāḥ (“beings possessing souls”). If you obscure the head, you render the figure incomplete and therefore permissible. I saw nothing like this in Kabul.

The call comes; the venue is a gated residence just across the road. I walk into a spacious garden, where a flunky is watering a comparatively lush lawn. Inside, I am shown into a large room and asked to wait.

After a few minutes, Mujahid enters and sits down. He is immaculate in a white shalwar kameez with dark blue waistcoat and brown, patterned turban. Five years on, he tells me, the Taliban’s victory has brought what Afghans wanted most. “No war, no fighting, and a unified government in place.”

But victory has also forced the Taliban to govern, not just fight. Its foot soldiers and clerics, formed in the madrassas and mountains, must also now serve as policemen, civil servants and diplomats. They must manage budgets and rebuild infrastructure. For this they need international recognition, and aid money from international organizations and Western countries — above all, the US. “We definitely want good relations with the USA,” Mujahid tells me. “We have tried, but they have to try as well.”

Recognition has not been forthcoming. I ask Mujahid about the first government press conference he gave in 2021, when he promised that women would be able to work and study within the bounds of Islamic law. Girls have since been excluded from secondary schools and women from universities.

“I said that everything would be according to Sharia,” he replies, maintaining a serious demeanor and a quiet, even tone of voice throughout. “I still say that. Human rights, education — everything.”

Women still work in hospitals, schools, banks and government, he says, before adding that the exclusion of girls from secondary education, now approaching its fifth year, is “only a slight disruption in the education system”. The Emirate is working to find a way for women to study “with the necessary segregation, transport and safeguards”.

The matter of women’s rights is a serious problem for the government — even among its supporters.  Mainstream Islamic law does not ban the education of women; even hardline theocracies such as Saudi Arabia have eased the restrictions on women in recent years. Afghans are furious. In Kabul, on my second day in the country, I met a man out walking with his three daughters. “We have seen a lot of improvements in different sectors and in the rebuilding of our country,” he told me. “But there are big limitations for girls. They should be able to go to school. This is a big ambition of every Afghan. We hope the government will listen to the voice of our citizens.”

But the Taliban will not budge. I suspect Mujahid will be giving the same answers to the same questions five years from now.

I ask him about another contentious issue. In Kandahar, fiber-optic internet has been cut off to private homes. Mujahid insists this is not an internet ban, but a means of ensuring internet use stays within Sharia guidelines. “With mobile internet we can [control it] to a degree,” he explains, “but with fiber-optic Wi-Fi it is harder.”

Every Talib I meet echoes what Samangani told me: they defeated the most powerful and technologically advanced army in history because of “Allah” and their faith. But the more time I spend in Afghanistan, especially in Kandahar, the clearer it is to me that the Taliban are not to be regarded simply as quasi-medieval fanatics. To Westerners, they might seem like barbarians — particularly in their treatment of women — but they do not reject technology or modernity. Except where they cannot control them, they have absorbed both.

As a result, I’m witnessing a kind of Taliban “March of Progress”. Talibs still patrol the streets with long hair, matted beards, black turbans and the imprint of the village. But what’s also emerging is a discernibly post-American Talib. At the many checkpoints between Kabul and Kandahar, these men now stand guard in matching uniforms, patches identifying them as Afghan National Police. Some wear black balaclavas like Western special forces. They cradle their weapons with conspicuous discipline: fingers straight along the receiver rather than curled around the trigger. They carry M16s and Kalashnikovs, the most famous weapons of the two superpowers defeated in Afghanistan.

One morning, I awake to the sound of a helicopter flying low overhead. “Taliban air force,” explains a friend — who proceeds to tell me a story. When the Taliban swept to power five years ago, the US-trained Afghan pilots were told to fly the helicopters to the safety of Tajikistan. One of them, already in the air, called his father to ask what he should do. The father hurried to the Taliban in their village and laid out his son’s dilemma. “He’s a son of Afghanistan,” they said. “He must come back. He will be safe.” The father relayed the message; his son switched off his transponder, turned the helicopter around mid-air, and flew home. The Taliban kept their word. Now he works as an instructor, teaching Taliban pilots to fly the helicopters the Americans left behind.

The Taliban have embraced many of the technologies and institutions of the Western order they defeated, all the while rejecting its overarching values. They carry American rifles and use Western smartphones, yet remain unyieldingly beholden to Sharia. To them there is no contradiction. Washington assumed that modernization meant, inexorably, Westernization. But the Taliban learned from America without becoming American. And in so doing they exposed the category error on which America’s war was based.

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The US-led coalition claimed to be in the state-building business, but in truth it extended a narrow Western template of statehood to Afghanistan. The West offered Afghans the liberal franchise, confident they would accept it. Why wouldn’t they? This was 2001. Liberal democracy had won the Cold War, helped bring peace to Yugoslavia and presided over a decade of extraordinary capitalist prosperity. Washington went in, convinced that economic development, education, connectivity and institutions would bring democracy in their wake — and turn Kabul into Copenhagen.

I think about this during my visit to the Khirka Sharif: a compound of buildings smothered in stars and polygons, plants and flowers. Lines of Qur’anic calligraphy thread through the patterns. Turquoise, blue and green mingle with ochre, gold and pink. Kandahar’s streets are sludge and concrete, but here, smooth white stone encircles an explosion of geometry, brilliant in the summer sun.

According to local tradition, Khirka Sharif houses the cloak bestowed upon the Prophet Muhammad during his ascension to heaven (the Mi’raj). The cloak played an important role in the early mythology of the Taliban — literally “students” in Pashto — which emerged in Kandahar in the mid-1990s. On 4 April 1996, the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, took the cloak out of its cloth-covered box and carried it onto the roof of Kandahar’s main mosque. There, he held it aloft before thousands of religious scholars, fighters and supporters. The crowd erupted: men threw their turbans into the air in the hope that they might touch the sacred garment, while some reportedly fainted. The assembled ulema (Islamic scholars) acclaimed Omar Amir al-Mu’minin — “Commander of the Faithful” — and pledged allegiance to him. By associating himself publicly with both the Prophet and Ahmad Shah Durrani, the founder of the Afghan state who had brought the cloak to Kandahar, Omar sanctified his leadership and transformed a sacred relic into a source of political authority.

A few months later, on 27 September, Taliban forces captured Kabul and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It lasted until 2001, when the Americans arrived with historically unprecedented military power and the apparatus of state-building: NGOs and aid agencies, elections and constitutions, Excel spreadsheets, risk assessments and results frameworks. These were the iconography of a different faith, one that rooted its legitimacy in the post-World War II liberal order.

The Taliban’s victory laid bare the error and the arrogance of that project. Modernization and Westernization are not the same thing. A fiber-optic cable is neither autocratic nor liberal. A regime can want modern roads and Western investment while oppressing women and killing homosexuals. After two weeks of reporting in Afghanistan, observing how that what is left of the American occupation has been almost completely appropriated by the Taliban; the attempt to force regime change through military means was always doomed. Today, the West pays lip service to this lesson — but the instinct, judging by Donald Trump’s attempts to topple the Islamist regime in Tehran, remains.

Just before I leave the city, I stop for lunch. I’m sitting cross-legged on the carpet, eating meat and rice, when a Talib in his early twenties comes in and sits down next to me, fascinated by the presence of foreigners. We talk. He joined the Taliban at 12 and fought the Americans and British for years. He likes my Western sunglasses and, ignoring the prohibition on photography, eagerly poses for pictures wearing a pair borrowed from my photographer. Photos and transatlantic fashion clearly delight him. What, I ask him, are his hopes for the future of Afghanistan?

“Taliban,” he says without hesitation, and smiles beatifically.

I journey back, and just under 100 miles south of Kabul, I pass through the city of Ghazni, its entrance dominated by three light-blue domes. Its open-air military museum displays rows of burned-out Soviet tanks, monuments to the Afghan mujahideen’s victory in the 1979–1989 Soviet–Afghan War. A thousand years earlier, Ghazni was the imperial capital of Mahmud of Ghazni, later celebrated as the “idol-breaker” (but-shikan) after his destruction of the Hindu temple at Somnath. When Mullah Omar destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, he invoked Mahmud, casting himself as a modern-day but-shikan.

The occupying Westerners lacked this sense of history. Shortly after the disastrous 2021 withdrawal, I asked a British soldier who had served in Afghanistan how, after twenty years of war, we had understood the country so poorly. “The thing is,” he told me, “we served one-year tours and left. We weren’t there for twenty years but twenty lots of one.” Western soldiers, diplomats and officials rotated through the war, but the Taliban lived it year after year. And their sense of time and place stretched back centuries — to the cloak of the Prophet and the legend of Mahmud. There was only ever going to be one winner.

Much of the criticism has centered on the role of Secretary of Defense — ahem, War — Pete Hegseth’s decision to “double tap” the alleged traffickers: hitting survivors a second time to ensure death — after they’ve already been incapacitated. Such conduct is indeed ethically troubling, however, the current controversy elides the larger issues.

I should know. After a stint in the army, I served as a targeting analyst attached to the Joint Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2013, helping to identify Taliban targets for elimination or capture. For all the flaws of what used to be called the Global War on Terror, my comrades and I acted according to tight restrictions, guided by the laws of war. Furthermore we conducted our operations against armed combatants and under the authority of an Authorization for Use of Military Force voted on by Congress.

The current controversy misses the bigger flaw in the administration’s hemispheric operations: contrary to Vance’s arguments, the extralegal operations against trafficking don’t repudiate “permanent Washington” — but offer it succor. The military-industrial complex and the hawkish security establishment want nothing more than to see the nation embroiled in yet another long and constitutionally dubious conflict with unclear goals and the potential to topple yet another government willy-nilly.

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By Juan David Rojas

In the two decades after 9/11, the Bush and Obama administrations launched several wars of this kind, wasting thousands of American lives and trillions of taxpayer dollars — for what, exactly? In 2016, Trump clinched the GOP presidential nomination by condemning this enormous waste. Now, by embracing a state of never-ending war and state of emergency, a condition declared by an omnipotent executive branch, the second Trump administration has embraced essential elements of the deep state, the very machine the Trumpians were twice elected to dismantle.

Once upon a time, American conservatives were deeply committed to resisting the expansion of presidential war powers. Indeed, “Mr. Republican” himself, Sen. Robert A. Taft, commenting on the state of American pseudo-belligerency in the North Atlantic in 1941, argued that “if the President can declare or create an undeclared naval war beyond [Congress’s] power to act upon, the Constitution might just as well be abolished”.

Conservative Republicans similarly balked at President Truman’s unilateral use of military force in Korea and other trappings of the early Cold War state, arguing that the condition of permanent emergency empowered their liberal political enemies, “the war party” at the expense of constitutional norms and limited government.

They lost that political fight, and a new paradigm of an empowered presidency, tasked with securing an ever-expanding set of “national-security” interests, was born. Over the course of the Cold War and afterward, presidents from both parties upheld this new model, one that sanctioned a massive, permanent military bureaucracy. Americans became inured to a chief executive who could order US troops into combat with little to no congressional input, seeing the empowered presidency as an essential component of a modern state. The imperial presidency, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called it, became the core political supposition of postwar America, one that survived the interregnum of Watergate and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.    

Throughout the Global War on Terror, successive presidents from both parties leaned on this legacy to justify military action in Yemen, Somalia, and Syria — wars conducted without explicit congressional authorization or clear, achievable political ends. Indeed, the open-endedness of these “forever wars” made possible by unbounded executive authority provided an essential plank for the MAGA platform, one that the Trump administration is now ripping up. The White House is instead doubling down on the original endless war, on the assumption that attempting the impossible in one’s neighborhood — winning the war on drugs — is somehow more prudent than attempting “the impossible all over the world”.

Southern Spear, as with the War on Terror and the Cold War before it, conserves another component of permanent Washington: namely, a permanent emergency based on emotionalism and obfuscation. Under the imperial presidency, America’s wars have been sold via slippery language and amorphous geographical and conceptual boundaries. Washington inched its way into both world wars based, in part, on open-ended conceptions of neutrality and shifting boundaries of the Western Hemisphere. In both Korea and Vietnam, such quagmires were deepened through incremental escalation, crises that silenced debate and left tens of thousands of American dead.

More recently, the Global War on Terror, a quixotic war against a tactic — terrorism — yielded a 20-year morass without an achievable political objective, all the while furthering the growth of the security state at home. Throughout the War on Terror, the security state sold adventurism abroad by personalizing and inflating the threat of terrorism at home, making individual Americans unduly afraid that they could be the victims of terror. In all of these wars, the real winners were the Beltway bureaucrats — Vance’s permanent Washington — who administered them, often in careers that spanned eras, thereby preventing genuine national-security reform.  

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In Latin America, the Trump administration is conserving the core interests of permanent Washington. The White House has not only preserved the imperial presidency, but expanded its powers. While Trump’s recent predecessors pushed the boundaries of existing Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, the Trump administration, through a novel interpretation of the terrorism designation, has given itself the authority to commit acts of war. The administration’s obscurantism about the strikes and its guiding strategy for them are another inherited facet of permanent Washington’s predilection for secrecy in the service of unachievable goals.

The Trump administration is employing the same narrative games used by previous administrations. The primary rhetorical vehicle, the fluctuating label of “narcoterrorism”, once applied to acts of terror in service of the drug trade, has been applied to the trade itself. Similarly, the administration and its supporters have spuriously compared overdose deaths — tragic as they are — to American combat casualties. Associating an overdose of American at home to the death of an American draftee in the rice paddies of Vietnam is an absurd conflation that strips the drug epidemic of its context. This narrative slippage is but the latest example of Washington’s shameless shifting of symbols to prep the public for another unwinnable war like the ones that defined much of my career as a soldier and intelligence professional.

Someday in the near future, the Trump era will end. Betraying its campaign pledges, the Trump administration has not served as a disruptive force for permanent Washington, the deep state, or whatever euphemism one favors for the suite of institutions and assumptions that guide American geopolitics in the postwar era. By remilitarizing the War on Drugs — to say nothing of a potential regime change in Venezuela — the White House is breathing new life into the political forces that it claimed to oppose.

Southern Spear is not a break with permanent Washington — it is its logical conclusion.

If all that weren’t bad enough, Cheney was also a chief engineer of what historians call the “Imperial Presidency” — an institutional development in which the executive office routinely ignores or exceeds constitutional limits, particularly in matters of foreign policy and war powers. That precedent was later used by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to bypass Congress and overthrow Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya, sending the nation into a death‑spiral where the slave trade again became legal. Obama’s administration also invoked the Imperial Presidency to carry out extrajudicial techno‑militarist killings of “enemies of state” via drones in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And now, thanks to Cheney’s pioneering zeal, we have a sitting US president who uses his contempt for limits on his power to impose a sweeping global tariff regime and create a massive domestic agency that rounds up unwanted immigrants.

Cheney was indeed, as has been repeated endlessly in recent days, the most powerful vice president in all US history. It is a fact sure to appear in the opening line of every obituary, encyclopedia entry, and perhaps even chiseled into his epitaph. But a better way of understanding his fame is that Cheney was the Rasputin of the worst US presidential administration of the modern era. While Grigori Rasputin remains perhaps the most distressingly evil, dark magicians of all time — whispering insane advice that led Czar Nicholas II and the Romanov’s to ruin — Dick Cheney had the same effect on George W. Bush, but in a far more mundane, Americana‑like manner. In the lead‑up to the Iraq War, in his seemingly humble and even‑tempered Midwestern tone, Cheney frequently made speeches and appeared on television, pushing for “preemptive” action” to address the grave threat of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.”

Declassified memos and later congressional testimony show that Cheney and his aides pressured not just President Bush, but the intelligence agencies to overstate Iraq’s “WMDs.” Cheney was also the one who, after September 11th, authorized the NSA’s warrantless wire‑tapping program, which made the entire US population a target of the kind of at‑scale eavesdropping that Rasputin could have only dreamed of.  In the end, as with Rasputin’s spooky mystical sway over the Romanovs, Cheney’s clandestine maneuvering resulted in a disastrous presidential administration — one that historians will likely conclude broke the American empire, wasting wasting $4-6 trillion on an absurd quest to bring Anglo‑style democracy to the Islamic world.

Cheney’s financial ties to the American war machine were, however, more direct. Before joining the 2000 ticket, he served as CEO of Halliburton, the giant energy‑services firm. Critics frequently pointed to the overlap between his corporate past and the Bush administration’s contracting choices. Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR emerged as major recipients of lucrative, often no‑bid, contracts for reconstruction, logistics, and fuel services in Iraq — awards that watchdogs and congressional investigators repeatedly flagged for poor oversight and the appearance of favoritism.

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Put simply, Cheney helped normalize a revolving door between government and corporate power that turned war into a revenue stream for his affiliated investments and contractors. The grotesque entanglement of private interest profiteering and public violence is now a permanent feature of American statecraft. Cheney was one of its primary architects. If all this weren’t bad enough, Cheney’s administration was so dreadful that it ultimately produced the Obama‑Biden counter-revolution — which, rather than correcting the economic or military disasters of the Bush years, plagued the nation with the worst aspects of progressive moralism: fixating on tone and etiquette, and insisting the working class mind its manners while recognizing the alleged “plight” of elite minorities and privileged professionals.

“At least the Democrats didn’t start the Iraq War” was a line that justified this incessant fence-sitting moralizing. The result is that we now inhabit a country where the collective shine on the American state has dulled to the point that many Millennials and Gen Z question the value of democracy altogether, while allied nations warn their citizens that we may no longer be a safe place to visit. Meanwhile, both major parties are run by self‑dealing opportunists, raiding the public coffers for their donors, investors, and cronies alike. Biden and Trump might have taken this approach to governance to its extreme, but Cheney, as the kids say, “hit it first”.

Thus we’re left to ask — is the tragicomedy of late‑stage American politics all Dick Cheney’s fault? Hardly. But, at the start of the 21st century, Cheney contributed more than most to the doom loop Americans now occupy. Appropriate to George W. Bush’s Austin statehouse origins, the Iraq War initiated a Texas two‑step of national self‑destruction. The first step was the war itself. The second was melting the brains of the Gen‑X Left, who would create the first iteration of “resistance” liberalism — the so‑called “Anybody‑But‑Bush” milieu.

Strange as it is in retrospect, my first real job in journalism was at the media headquarters of the 2004 “Anybody‑But‑Bush” movement, writing radio news at the notoriously unlistenable Air America Radio, designed to be a “Fox News for Democrats”. Not only did the radio network launch the coastal‑centric and insufferably elitist careers of Rachel Maddow, Marc Maron, and Sam Seder, it did something far more impactful in the long term. Along with Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, the station helped establish the Democratic Party propaganda framework that would become the blueprint for most of American legacy media in the 2010s and early 2020s. And it did so — as I witnessed personally — under the very specific auspices of the Bush‑Cheney regime’s grotesqueness. The first name on the marquee was widely presumed to be little more than a figurehead for Cheney and Karl Rove, the true masterminds behind the curtain.

While sitting at my computer on election night over two decades ago now, with the outcome still in doubt, I had to look away as the station’s executives began becoming physically aroused at the prospect of John Kerry prevailing in Ohio. Days earlier, I had placed bets with several co‑workers in the newsroom predicting that Kerry would lose to the Bush‑Cheney machine. Over and over, I’d tried to explain that there was simply no way a self‑serious, blue-blood like Kerry would ever be welcomed by Middle American voters.

None of my co‑workers considered this rationale worthy of consideration, even when it proved correct. In their minds, the only people who voted for Bush and Cheney were “racists” or “rubes”. Their white‑hot hatred for the Cheney‑run administration overshadowed any desire to treat cultural politics as something delicate and worthy of respect. It’s a mindset that’s still predominant throughout the Washington‑to‑NYC “Acela corridor” establishment media.

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A decade before Trump Derangement Syndrome became a tangible phenomenon, Bush and Cheney anticipated it by dissolving the rational critical-thinking capacity of the wealthy Gen X Democratic Party apparatchiks. Despite their inability to reconcile the reality of Bush’s everyman appeal — and the abject failure of their network to turn a profit — this group of pseudo‑journalists broadcasting from the 41st floor of Park Avenue South ultimately created the partisan model that took over mainstream media in the decades to come.

Air America Radio became the prototype for MSNBC — which eventually provided the audience strategy for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and what remained of the Condé Nast media empire. A world where “conservative” is nearly as dirty a label as “pedophile”, and anyone “on the Right” is presumed to be a white supremacist. And it all started with their burning hatred for Dick Cheney. He was a conniving and duplicitous but highly effective political puppeteer who, truth be told, they all would have loved to have on their side.

After Trump’s rise, that opportunity came about — and the Democratic establishment took it. So much of the Left‑liberal media, including my former co‑worker Rachel Maddow, who had spent countless hours portraying Cheney as the literal embodiment of evil, overnight turned coat and began calling him a “hero”. Why? Because, once it became a good career move, Cheney joined his daughter in standing against Trump.

A year ago, just before the 2024 election, Cheney declared: “In our nation’s 248‑year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.” While I personally share the sentiment, it’s quite rich coming from Cheney — the man who personally designed the throne of the Imperial Presidency — to now say what America really needs is devotion to our history of republican checks‑and‑balances rule.

Now that we’ve seen its final turn, Cheney’s career arc — more than anyone’s — exposes the core absurdity of modern Democratic politics. Its deepest drive isn’t New Deal‑style liberalism, or even progressive social tolerance, but what Thomas Frank calls “anti‑populism.” An elitist impulse that exists solely to thwart the (small “d”) democratic desires of working people. Before heading to the great pasture in the sky, Cheney saw the light of anti‑populism, and that’s enough for establishment Democrats to declare him one of their own.

On Wednesday, while pundits were still helping the White House congratulate itself for killing the 71-year-old terrorist leader, China responded to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan by launching a massive, four-day combined arms live fire exercise around the island. While the US broadcasts mixed signals about its commitment to defending Taiwan, Beijing has been absolutely clear that it is willing to go to war, and has now encircled the island in an unprecedented show of force.

The lesson of the past week could not be any clearer. The American ruling class has no sense of what role it is meant to play in world affairs. It acts with reckless senility, provoking rival powers while uncertain of its own aims. To distract from this underlying reality, it fixates on symbolically potent acts like the killing of al-Zawahiri. But for how long can this go on?

None of which is a reason to mourn for al-Zawahiri, if indeed he is really dead. This is at least the fourth report of his death over the last two decades, though the first time it has been announced by a US president. Surely the best time to have killed al-Zawahiri would have been when he came to the United States in 1993 on a Bay Area fundraising tour — the same year of the first al-Qaeda-directed World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people. But better late than never.

Assuming that the reports of his death are real, however, it would be prudent  to take the details with a grain of salt. After all, the initial details about the raid that killed al-Zawahiri’s predecessor, Osama Bin Laden, who had supposedly used his wife as a human shield, were later revealed to be false, the products of a manufactured narrative. The timing of the 2011 Bin Laden raid was no doubt connected to the exigencies of the intelligence business; it had a political dimension as well, taking place in the same year Obama withdrew American troops from Iraq.

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The circumstances around al-Zawahiri’s death raise a different set of questions. It appears that the al-Qaeda leader entered Afghanistan last August shortly after the chaotic US withdrawal and Taliban takeover of the country. He was staying in an upscale area of downtown Kabul, a short distance from where the US once housed its embassy, reportedly in a safe house owned by a senior aide to Sirajuddin Haqqani. This is a significant detail because Sirajuddin, in addition to being the author of a recent op-ed in the New York Times, is the leader of the powerful Haqqani network, an outgrowth of the Haqqani dynastic clan, which has played a key role in Afghan politics for decades and whose patriarch, Jalaluddin, was once fêted by members of Congress as an anti-Soviet mujahideen commander. In addition to holding a place on Washington’s “specially designated global terrorist” list, Sirajuddin is also a member of the new Taliban government, serving as its acting interior minister.

When I arrived in Afghanistan in 2012 as a US Army officer, the Haqqani name was spoken of in grave tones. Operating from their stronghold in Paktia province, on Afghanistan’s treacherous southeastern frontier with Pakistan, the Haqqanis commanded an extended network of tribal loyalists, intelligence operatives, terrorist cells, and paramilitary forces. Under the leadership of Sirajuddin, they were kingmakers in Afghanistan’s fractious political scene and survived the two decades of US occupation by skillfully balancing relationships with al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups, the Pakistani intelligence services and the Taliban. Among soldiers, the Haqqanis were known for their skill at orchestrating complex terrorist attacks inside Afghanistan. In contrast with typical Taliban fighters, who were the country bumpkins of the Pashtun heartland, and whose attacks, while deadly, relied on conventional ambush tactics, the Haqqanis were more sophisticated and more lethal.

One fairly obvious conclusion to draw from the head of al-Qaeda being put up in downtown Kabul is that neither the Taliban nor the Haqqanis were overly concerned about a possible American response. But that is not the conclusion being drawn in Washington. Taking their cues from President Biden’s statement that the killing of al-Zawahiri is “proof that it’s possible to root out terrorism without being at war in Afghanistan”, foreign policy mandarins say the drone strike proves Washington’s “strategy” is working. Its success shows that the U.S. should rely more on “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism capabilities — i.e. those which do not require large numbers of American troops on the ground to be effective — as the central pillar of national security policy.

In an article for the Daily Beast headlined, “Biden Keeps a Promise With His Zawahiri Strike,” David Rothkopf writes:

“The attack was more than just a strike against a longtime member of America’s most-wanted terrorist list. It was both a vindication of Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan and a demonstration of the effectiveness of Biden’s counterterrorism strategy.”

An NBC news article polishes up a different angle of the official narrative by publicising Biden’s extraordinary scrupulousness and the “surgical” nature of the attack. “The strike was so precise that it killed al-Zawahiri on a balcony without harming family members elsewhere in the house,” the article reports, citing (who else?) an anonymous Biden official. Among the story’s five different authors is Ken Dilanian, whose close relationship with the U.S. security establishment has included routinely submitting past articles to the CIA for review before they were published.

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Beyond simply cheering for the party in power, these narratives promote the idea that drone strikes are an effective strategy for destroying America’s enemies and keeping its citizens safe. “See,” say the foreign policy experts and their validators in the media, “this is how we should have done it all along. We never needed to invade Afghanistan — to say nothing of Iraq — and spend two decades nation-building in order to target al-Qaeda.”

But while they are right about the folly of nation-building, they are delusional if they think that counterterrorism represents anything new and improved in the US policy arsenal. Over-the-horizon capabilities have been a central and growing plank of American power for the past two decades. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that the capabilities now being celebrated for their effectiveness and surgical precision are the very same methods employed last summer, when a different U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed 10 civilians, including seven children. The official narrative about that attack, dubbed “Righteous Strike,” was that it had targeted Islamic State members who were transporting explosives and posed an imminent threat to American troops. That false narrative spread widely before the grim truth came out.

Over-the-horizon capabilities are a fine thing for a nation to have but they are simply a tool, not a strategy for achieving long-term peace. In reality, if counterterrorism worked as advertised, al-Qaeda would have collapsed years ago. “According to recent scholarship based on papers captured from Bin Laden’s hideout, the CIA’s drone campaign that targeted al-Qaeda between 2008 and 2013 devastated the core organisation, which was based in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” wrote Steve Coll in a New Yorker column published after al-Zawahiri’s death.

If it were possible for the US to drone strike its way to a lasting victory in the War on Terror, the war would already be won. But as Coll’s observation implies, the backdrop of the terrorist problem is the states which support them. Counterterrorism is great for generating publicity ops, lucrative contracts for the defence industry, and reliable sinecures for legions of experts. But in two decades of war, it was never able to address the fundamental reality of the Pakistani state’s support for al-Qaeda. Nor could it keep Afghanistan from falling right back into the hands of the Taliban.

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In the most important conflicts taking place today, in Ukraine and around Taiwan, America’s over-the-horizon tools are of limited use. Even the spectacle of notching new “kills” on the high-profile terrorist scoreboard seems to be losing its lustre. Much of the appeal of counterterrorism at this point, apart from promising to prevent more fruitless two-decade occupations, is that it is a self-perpetuating institution. The counterterrorism lobby is more powerful than ever inside Washington because it offers the appearance of a guiding strategic principle behind American power, where none actually exists.

As US leadership escalates confrontation with two nuclear powers in China and Russia, it cannot even define where its nation’s vital interests are at stake in those arenas. The long exercise in hunting down terrorist groups has been a diversion from the core responsibilities of statecraft: defining one’s relationship to other countries in a way that maximises the security and prosperity of the nation.

Can Pelosi articulate how her trip to Taiwan benefited Americans? In a bare room with no aides, could Biden convincingly explain what the US involvement in Ukraine is meant to accomplish? To avoid catastrophe, America needs leaders who can answer such basic questions, not more drones.

Last Tuesday a 15-year-school boy, recently named as Ethan Crumbley, allegedly shot and killed four fellow students, injuring seven others. This happened at a high school in suburban Detroit, Michigan. The week before, Darrell Brooks allegedly drove his SUV into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring many more. According to witnesses, he appeared to be intentionally trying to hit people; one of the victims was an eight-year-old boy. At the time of the attack, Brooks was on bail, after being charged with running over the mother of his child in a domestic dispute earlier last month.

Prosecutors in Michigan have levelled one charge of terrorism against Crumbley, in addition to four first-degree murder counts and numerous other charges. No charges of terrorism have been brought against Brooks; he instead faces six counts of first-degree homicide. 

This raises all sorts of questions about the politics of categorising mass-causality violence. While school-rampages often result in multiple deaths and terrorise those who are victimised in them, they are not conventionally classified as terrorism, since the motives of those who carry them out are typically personal. They are not intended to further a political cause or ideology. So it is curious that the authorities in Michigan have levelled a charge of terrorism.

Crumbley’s alleged motives are as yet unclear, although he reportedly left some writings that may shed some light on his thinking. Explaining the terrorism charge to CNN, Karen McDonald, the Oakland county [Michigan] prosecutor, said that Crumbley had set out to kill and injure as many people as possible. “If that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is,” she said, in the process enlarging the concept of terrorism far beyond its standard meaning of politically-motivated violence against civilians and into the far broader domain of criminal murderousness. McDonald also noted, by way of further explanation, “how terrifying it is to be in close proximity of another student shooting and killing fellow students. I mean, it’s terror”.

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Brooks’s alleged motives are similarly unclear, although we know that he had advocated for attacks against white people on social media and shared an anti-Semitic meme praising Hitler. We also know that vehicular rammings, unlike high school shootings, are a common modus operandi of terrorists. Scores of ISIS-inspired and directed operatives, for example, have used cars and trucks as weapons of mass-slaughter. So it is seems worth noting that Brooks, who clearly harboured extremist sentiments, and whose alleged victims were all white, has not been given a terrorism charge. Needless to say, Brooks’s alleged actions would have been terrorising to those who were on the receiving end of them.

What is even more curious is the incuriosity of the elite media and extremism experts about the Brooks case. Had he been a white male who had expressed misogynistic views about women it is certain that they would have staged a giant moral panic about the global menace of incels and the far-Right.

But Brooks, who is a registered sex offender and trader in online hate, has attracted little sustained discussion or concern. To be clear: I’m not saying that the Brooks case should occasion a moral panic, or that he be given a terrorism charge. There’s still much that we don’t know about him, his state of mind, motives and indeed mental health. But I do think we should ask questions about the selection bias of the credentialed commentators and experts who command so much of our attention.

As the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari has recently documented, the coverage of the Brooks case by mainstream media outlets has been quite appalling. The Washington Post, in a tweet, described the ramming attack as a “tragedy caused by a SUV”. A CBS national correspondent made reference to “the Wisconsin parade crash”, as if what happened was an unfortunate accident. If this sounded coldly dispassionate and euphemistic in the extreme, it is because it was. What it emphatically wasn’t was an inferno of alarmist online commentary and outrage about the perpetrator’s vile beliefs.

The Michigan attack, by contrast, has provoked a very different kind of commentary and critical probing. Thomas Renard, director of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague, tweeted: “This case raises so many questions: What is terrorism? Does terrorism offence bring any added value in such case? Could it be counter productive? Should we use CT [counter-terrorism] toolbox more often, to deal with more forms of extremism, or not? Pros and Cons?”

Renard is right: the Michigan school shooting does raise many questions, one of which is why extremism scholars like Renard had nothing to say about Brooks’s alleged vehicular ramming attack and how that case might raise questions about terrorism and ideologically motivated violence more broadly.

To be fair to Renard and my fellow extremism researchers, perhaps they just hadn’t clocked the news about the Waukesha attack, especially given that it had attracted relatively little media attention. Or perhaps they had heard about it, but were apt to ignore it because Brooks wasn’t charged with terrorism.

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But neither explanation holds up to scrutiny. Many terrorism experts and extremism researchers are very online. Some of these people, evidently, are never not online. It’s hard to think that the Waukesha attack would have escaped their notice.

There’s also a whole cottage industry of counter-extremist entrepreneurs which thrives on churning out report after report on the wider online “eco-systems” of misogynistic hate and racialised invective. So it’s odd that Brooks’s violent rhetoric, and past violence against women, didn’t raise any eyebrows among a group of researchers who are nothing if not hyper-vigilant when it comes to spotting signs of hate.

I suspect other and deeper imperatives and incentives are at work. One is to do with what the American sociologist Erving Goffman called “impression management”, while the other relates to the politics of grift. The triumph of identity politics, and the fear of running afoul of the puritanical scolds who police it, has meant that whenever an act of mass-casualty violence has been perpetrated by a white male — that reviled figure of opprobrium in the cosmology of the what Wesley Yang terms the “successor ideology” — it is tempting to vigorously call it out and to account. The act of doing so has become a familiar ritual in public life, the purpose of which is to communicate one’s virtue.

It is to pronounce, in effect, “I really care about the evil of systemic racism”. In a Durkheimian sense, it also allows people to bond with other morally upstanding people, and in a way that is emotionally seductive.

The temptation to call out or draw attention to the mass-casualty violence of the far-Right is even stronger for extremism researchers, since many have made decent careers out of researching and writing about jihadist groups and violence. This makes them vulnerable to the charge of islamophobia and racism, or both, and perhaps even gives them a bad conscience. From the perspective of their Left-leaning critics, these researchers are guilty of focusing disproportionately on the jihadist threat or perpetuating dangerous “essentialist” tropes about Islam and Muslims.

Nobody wants to be accused of Islamophobia or racism, and one way of forestalling or neutralising that accusation is to constantly amplify the threat of the far-Right. Of course, extremism researchers would deny that they’re in the business of impression management, of trying to foster a righteous impression before others. And if they’re sounding alarmist about the far-Right threat, this is because the threat is so goddamn alarming that it keeps them awake at night.

Another reason why extremism researchers are now so transfixed on the far-Right threat is because it’s unquestionably good for business. It’s where all the grant money is. You certainly won’t receive state or private funding by saying that the QAnon threat is exaggerated or that incels are more dangerous to themselves than to others. And no publisher is going to offer a lucrative book deal for How Terrorism is Overblown.

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This isn’t just an American pathology. Here in Britain two recent acts of lethal violence engendered two very different responses. One was a killing spree by a 22-year-old man called Jake Davison. In just 12 minutes he killed his mother in the house they shared and then went on to shoot to death four others, before turning his weapon on himself. Devon and Cornwall Police initially ruled out terrorism as a motive, although it was known that Davison had visited incel online forums and was a disgruntled virgin. This prompted a slew of commentary on how Davison was a terrorist, and how incels were far-Right extremists. The Guardian ran a story titled, “Should the Plymouth shootings be declared an act of terror?” Quite why the headline-writer thought it necessary to phrase the headline as a question was unclear, since the whole substance of the piece sought to argue that there was little doubt that it should be declared an act of terror.

Then, in October, Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old British-Somali man, allegedly stabbed to death the Conservative MP David Amess. The police soon declared this a terrorist incident, and had referred to “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. Yet the main focus of the media response was not on the political motives of the perpetrator, but rather the scourge of online hate aimed at British politicians more generally, as if somehow the dark corners of the internet had murdered Amess.

It gets boring to keep pointing out the double-standard here, which is that progressives are liable to deny or sanitise the political violence of those with whom they are in sympathy (pre-eminently minorities), while amplifying the political violence of their enemies (pre-eminently the running dogs of white, heteronormative patriarchy). Of course, the Right is also prone to a similar double-standard, pointing out the mental health problems of far-Right attackers while prioritising the role of militant religiosity in jihadi attacks. But it’s imperative for terrorism experts and extremism researchers to resist this sort of tribal temptation.

What is terrorism and who is a terrorist? A lot of ink has been wasted in trying to answer this, but it’s really not that complicated. Terrorism, as the Australian philosopher Tony Coady has usefully defined it, is “the organised use of violence to attack non-combatants (i.e. civilians) or their property for political purposes”. Correspondingly, a terrorist is someone who commits this kind of violence.

The trouble with terrorism, as a concept, relates not to its core meaning, but to its practical application. Was the Michigan school-shooter a terrorist? Was Darrell Brooks? The honest answer to both questions is that it’s still too early to tell — and that both cases are complex. Yet it’s striking that only one of those questions is being publicly asked right now, and it’s not the second one.

And yet somehow — despite all the vigils, all the pledges, all the policy announcements — Islamism remains as potent as ever.

It is two weeks to the day since Sir David Amess was stabbed to death — and already it seems like it’s old news, discarded from the national conversation. This is partly due to the reporting restrictions put in place after a suspect was charged; Ali Harbi Ali is not a murderer until proven as such.

But that should not prevent us from having a broader discussion, on a societal level, about the way we respond — or, more important, do not respond — to acts of terrorism. For it seems to me that there is an implicit message in our reluctance to dwell on Amess’s death: we are content to accept that, despite the horror that follows every attack, Islamist terrorism, if indeed that is what it is, is a fact of life.

We will grieve for individuals such as David Amess, and for other innocent victims whose names and faces we don’t know or remember. But terror is no longer seen as something that will go away; it is something we just need to get used to.

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Part of this defeatism has been dominant since I fled Somalia as a teenager. Islamism, in essence, is a political philosophy, one that is rooted in jihad but seeks to describe how society should be run. It is more than an irrational and violent ideology: it is an attack on liberalism itself.

But for the past three decades, the West’s response has been one of cowardice masked by arrogance. We needn’t fight back; it’s much better, we’re told, to stay quiet in the hope that, one day, those who hold competing ideologies will come through and see things from our side. Evidently, it is not working.

More concerning, though, is the rise of a new type of defeatism — this time disguised as a progressive form of self-flagellation. Imagine you are a young British Muslim. At school and university, you’re repeatedly warned about Britain’s colonial roots; that the country your parents fled to, in the hope of escaping persecution and anarchy, is the cause of it all. And then you’re told: don’t worry, it’s not your fault. You are merely a victim; evil white people are all to blame.

This dispiriting approach to education, which has taken hold on both sides of the Atlantic, is often justified using the rhetoric of “equality” and “diversity”. In practice, however, I suspect it is more helpful to view it in the context of something called “dawa”. In Arabic, the term simply denotes a centuries-old, non-violent call to Islam — though in practice, it has become a tool used by Islamists to encourage Muslims to embrace their extreme ideology and disavow the West. More often than not, this is achieved by branding Western society as ungodly and sinful, as something that needs to be either reformed or destroyed. In other words, you have two choices: either come and join us, or we’ll need to wage a holy war.

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Whether they realise it or not, progressives are saying something strikingly similar. In their eyes, too, the West is evil, home to foundational structures that serve only the white, heterosexual, male oppressor. So when the Islamists come along and say that Allah has given you a higher purpose, one that will culminate with ending the wickedness of the West, young British Muslims are already half-way there. Hatred for their country is all they know.

That’s how a 22-year-old man can be driven to carry out a suicide bomb attack at a concert largely attended by children. Or how two men in their twenties can become inspired to behead an off-duty British soldier in broad daylight. Or how three teenage girls from East London can be coaxed into joining Isis.

Of course, none of this to say that identity politics or other forms of progressivism are solely to blame for the rise of Islamism. The influence of dawa across Europe and America is deeply concerning. And, as I have written before for UnHerd, Muslim communities need to do more to stop their young from being drawn into extremism.

But the difference with our insistence on demonising the West is that it’s a problem of our own making — and it’s something that we can fix. The most obvious way to start would be by devising a curriculum that doesn’t seek to portray Britain and America as evil at every turn.

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More urgently, though, liberalism needs to shake off its defeatist malaise and learn to compete with those ideologies that would see it destroyed. To new immigrants, as well as to our own schoolchildren, we need to teach the incredible success story of our way of life. We need to remind our younger generations why it’s better to live in Britain than, say, Somalia. The answer isn’t mysterious. I certainly feel no shame in saying it: there, women are treated as second-class citizens, and barbarity seeps into every aspect of your life. There, you have no liberty or rule of law.

In the West, on the other hand, we have all this and more. Perhaps above all else, we have the opportunity to die peacefully in our bed, of old age, surrounded by our family. That isn’t something that should be taken for granted; I should know. And yet we seem to have forgotten this, distracted by waging a toxic forever war which prioritises division over community.

But this is not a fight we can afford to sit out. Until we decide that the West is worth defending, Islamism will not be defeated — and innocent people will continue to be killed.

But Sinema is more enigmatic. It was said that she demanded $100 billion in cuts to proposed climate programmes, though this was denied by her office. The package was trimmed to $2 trillion, but she still refused to support it. She was accused of being bent on the “destruction” of the Biden Presidency. She had, one commentator wrote, a “death grip” on the Democratic Party.

In public, Sinema was taciturn, even as she was trailed and harried by progressive activists, who followed her into public restrooms, or tried to confront her at a marathon. Nobody on the Left understands her thinking; to the Washington Post she is simply “inscrutable“. So fury, and theorising, is their response. (Hers was to tell them, somewhat cryptically on Instagram, to “fuck off”.)

Biden’s bill has been maimed by Sinema, regardless of what happens in the weeks ahead. Eventually, interest in her may begin to fade, or she might face a primary challenge that ends her career as a senator. But there is another way to look at Sinema, one with wider and much longer-lasting implications for politics and political theory than her obstructionism in the Senate.

In recent years there have been two major shifts in the relationship between politics and political theory. On the one hand, a number of important modern political thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, once perceived in American academic and activists circles as useful, even necessary, for ostensibly radical and critical Leftist politics, have begun to appeal to the Right, which long rejected them. On the other hand, adherence to a capitalism-friendly version of academics and activists’ politics, especially on matters of culture, race and sexuality, became a condition of membership in nearly every important institution in the United States. Ideas that once generated a thrilling frisson of subversion in college seminars among students and teachers, who at the time could see themselves as joined in a common project of Leftist critique, have now become the ever-more explicit moral centre of our regime — or are being taken up by its opponents on the Right.

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Such changes can perhaps be traced more easily through the writings of thinkers whose minds, because of their mediocrity, reflect rather than resist larger trends. One such thinker — a former activist and, technically, a scholar — is Sinema, who holds a PhD in “Justice Studies” from Arizona State University. Her 2012 dissertation Who Must Die: the State of Exception in Rwanda’s Genocide, and her 2015 book of almost the same title, are representative moments in the double shift by which Leftists once enamoured of certain strands of radical political theory repurposed it towards the consolidation of a new hegemonic political morality, discarding its subversive dimension — and making it available to the Right.

In her work on Rwanda, Sinema purports, through a handful of incompletely understood concepts drawn chiefly from the writings of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, to discover in the genocide committed in 1994 a generalisable lesson about the importance of the rule of law. In its absence, she argues, the worst sorts of barbarities are possible, and indeed likely.

Sinema’s work has no original insights, and hardly any grasp on the theory that supposedly informs it. It is, however, a useful document. It sheds, in the first place, some light on Sinema herself, a former anti-war radical who is now perhaps the most notorious centrist in Congress and who prides herself on upbeat bipartisanship (expounded in her 2009 book, Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions that Win and Last). For those who would rather dim the lights on Sinema, an already highly-visible political personage, her invocation of Schmitt and Agamben offers an opportunity to consider the strange transformation that these theorists’ work has undergone.

Schmitt and Agamben, in principle, should have been uncomfortable reading for Sinema. The former was an early 20th-century German legal theorist who attacked liberal democracy and supplied theoretical justification for the Nazi regime; the latter is a still-living Italian philosopher who used Schmitt’s ideas for his own critique of liberalism, launched from the radical Left rather than the far Right. But, given Sinema’s political and intellectual origins on the anti-war Left of the early 2000s, her choice is less surprising. The two thinkers were critical references for activist and academic critics of American power throughout the War on Terror.

Since the Eighties and Nineties, Schmitt had become first acceptable, and then compulsory reading, for American political theorists, who were taken with what seemed to be his insights into the deficiencies of liberal democracy’s emphasis on the rule of law and the formal aspects of democratic procedure. Some thinkers on the Left, such as Chantal Mouffe, used his ideas to advocate for a reinvigorated form of political democracy that valued frankly acknowledged conflicts over neutral rules and norms. This so-called “agonism” once inspired populist Leftist movements in Europe, but seems to appeal to few American academics after the rise, since the first Trump campaign, of Right-wing populism at home. Norms — such as Nato and Nafta — suddenly appealed to Leftists who had long critiqued them.

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While some tried to use Schmitt to attack liberalism from the Left, others, drawing on Agamben’s interpretation of Schmitt, argued that the United States was becoming or had become a dangerously illiberal country. Schmitt had argued, infamously, that states inevitably find themselves confronted with “states of exception” — situations where legal norms can no longer be applied. In such instances, some agent must decide what is to be done so that order can be restored and the normal rules can function again. Schmitt saw this power to make decisions in exceptional circumstances as the essence of sovereignty. He argued that liberal democracies — oriented towards preserving the rule of law, which their leaders and ideologues imagine needs no supplement of sovereign decision-making — ignore this fact to their peril.

Agamben, however, countered that supposedly liberal states are in fact constantly dealing with “states of exception”. Liberals do not, in his view, periodically confront normless states of exception in crises; rather they constantly create these conditions. In a series of works including his 1995 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben drew on Schmitt and Foucault to warn that what he saw as the paradigmatic instances of the Nazis’ systematic illegality and inhumanity — the concentration camp and the lethal power of doctors over “life unworthy of life” (the disabled, mentally handicapped, etc.) — were also present, at least potentially, in democratic states, which create their own zones in which law and rights are suspended.

After 9/11, these arguments took on great cogency for many thinkers on the American Left. The US Government appeared to them to be suspending fundamental rights of its citizens through the Patriot Act, which suspended long-standing norms about the limits of state surveillance. Meanwhile, in Guantanamo Bay, the Government seemed to consign individuals to a site-specific state of exception in which the norms governing neither the treatment of prisoners of war, nor criminals applied. Agamben’s theories did not offer much clear direction on what critics of the apparently norm-less War on Terror might do to oppose the “sovereign” power of the United States, but they did give a moral and philosophical weight to critics’ sense that the country was on a dangerous slide towards reenacting the worst horrors of the 20th century.

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Rather than argue, as Schmitt and Agamben did, that states of exception necessarily appear, or that liberal states continually create them, Sinema insisted that such situations could be avoided by protecting the rule of law. This revealed a basic misunderstanding of her chosen interlocutors’ arguments. Schmitt posited that the rule of law is never adequate, since states of exception requiring the exercise of sovereignty necessarily appear; Agamben likewise argued, following Foucault, that liberal states are inherently unable to live up to their own constitutional norms and in their routine exercise of power, place certain spaces and persons outside them. Sinema, either with naïveté or the cunning of stupidity, simply wishes the problem away and urges us to follow the rules. But, while her intellectual inadequacies are her own, the lameness of her conclusion reflects a change in the political valence of theory.

By the mid-2010s, as Sinema was writing, Leftist opposition to the imperial and illiberal dimensions of American security policy was melting away — or moving to the Right. In the following years, fears about terrorism targeted the latter, painting American conservatives, and the spectre of white supremacy, as security threats in much the same rhetoric that had been used to describe Islamic terrorist networks.

Since the spring of 2020, as Agamben has repeatedly observed, Covid policy has imitated the War on Terror in its suspensions of rights — and intimated the handing over of political power to medical officials in ways anticipated in Homo Sacer. Thus, if Schmitt and Agamben remain relevant for understanding our politics, it is in ways that are uncomfortable for the cultural Left, which now finds itself increasingly running, rather than critiquing, the machinery of American power.

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In our present-day sequels to the War on Terror — the campaigns against racism and Covid — hegemonic institutions pursue enemies and suspend liberal norms in the name of our psychological and physical wellbeing. Now in possession of what we might call the commanding heights of the moral economy, from which it produces elites’ and would-be elites’ worldview, this Left no longer needs to perform radicalness.

It can assume instead the position of a centre ringed about by benighted, ignorant, but nevertheless dangerous enemies: conservatives. The latter are not credited with having specific, comprehensible or legitimate objections to the dominant policies and values. They are instead imagined as hateful, prejudiced enemies of legality, science, and moral decency — that is, they are seen not as political foes, but as cognitive and moral degenerates — in a manner that recalls the way Islamic terrorists during the Bush era were said to hate America “for our freedom” and to be full of irrational “Islamic rage”, rather than recognised as having a comprehensible set of objections to American policies in the Middle East.

We should not be surprised to hear pleas for the rule of law and deference for experts from those who once, drawing on radical theory, revealed the subterfuges and hypocrisies behind liberal norms of legality and objectivity. Critique, like terrorism, is a weapon of the weak. The powerful claim to defend security, reason and morality, while those out of power, grown clever and cynical from their experience of marginality, contest these claims and question whether such things even exist to be defended. With the cultural Left in the ascendancy, the political theory by which it climbed has become a ladder to be thrown away — and available to be taken up by the Right.

Long after the furore around Sinema is forgotten, her academic work will glint as one ironic point of light in this vast change in the way liberals and conservatives in America think about themselves and their country.

Prevent is a much-mocked government counter-terrorism strategy, which looks out for warning signs that someone is at risk of being radicalised into some form of violent extremism. About 6,000 people are referred to it each year. 

Every high-profile murder or act of terrorism appears to be followed by a story like this. The Manchester Arena suicide bomber was known to the security services. Lee Rigby’s killers were known to the security services. At least one of the London Bridge attackers was known to the security services. It’s not just in cases of terrorism: the murderer of Alice Gross had a criminal record for sexual assault. Sarah Everard’s killer had a history of indecent exposure.

There is a further sense of inevitability over the fact that, three days after Sir David’s murder, Priti Patel, the home secretary, declared that Prevent is “under review” to ensure that it is “fit for purpose”. This is, in fact, an ongoing review that was launched in 2019 and due to report in December, rather than a response to the atrocity. Yet the announcement was clearly intended to suggest that the murder represented a failure on the part of the surveillance and deradicalisation system.

But is it? The sense of inevitability is real: these stories crop up a lot. But the truth is they will continue to keep cropping up, almost every time there is a terror attack, and almost no matter what we do with Prevent or whatever its successor is. Prevent may be failing — though I’ll happily defer judgment until the publication of the review — but even if it were successful, when terrorist attacks happen, it is likely that the perpetrators would be on its books, or known to the security services.

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And more than that: as callous as it sounds, that may be for the best. To give a sense of why that is, it’s helpful to look at another system for spotting future risks: cancer screening.

You screen for prostate cancer with a blood test, which looks for levels of something called “prostate-specific antigen”, or PSA. If you’re between 50 and 69 years old, the “normal” level of PSA is given as below three nanograms per millilitre (ng/ml). If your test comes back higher than that, you are flagged as at risk of having prostate cancer.

But according to the NHS, about 15% of men who do have prostate cancer actually have “normal” levels of PSA: that is, below 3ng/ml. If you run a screening test like this, you’ll falsely reassure about one cancer sufferer in six that they are cancer-free.

There’s a straightforward solution to that, of course. Instead of putting your cut-off at 3ng/ml, you could make it 2.5ng/ml. Then you’d miss fewer cancers.

You can probably guess the outcome, though. If you move the cut-off lower, you’ll miss fewer real cancers, but you’ll scare more men unnecessarily. If you move the cut-off higher, you’ll get fewer false positives — you won’t tell as many men that they have cancer when they don’t — but you’ll get more false negatives: you’ll miss more real cancers.

You might think that it’s a pretty straightforward decision. Telling people that they have cancer when they don’t is inconvenient and alarming; telling people that they don’t have cancer when they do might kill them. So you err on the side of caution.

But that’s not how it works. False positives on cancer screenings can literally kill. People can end up having unnecessary surgeries, X-rays, chemo or radiotherapy. Complications are sufficiently common that the NHS says that the benefits of prostate cancer screening do not outweigh the risks.

The cost of getting it wrong is real with terrorism, too. The process is somewhat different, though. When it comes to the risk of someone being radicalised, unlike a blood test, there isn’t a number that you can read off. That doesn’t mean there can’t be one: it could be that the people who are passed on to Prevent are given a quasi-objective score. We do exactly that for, say, suicidality risk or autism or happiness, or any one of a thousand psychological functions. You tick boxes on a questionnaire about someone’s isolation, their anger, their ideologies, and if the score on the questionnaire adds up to more than 40 or whatever you declare them a terrorism risk. That is precisely what goes on, in a less obvious and open way, with things like AI parole decisions. 

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But as it happens, there isn’t an explicit number. The Prevent guidance says: “There is no fixed profile of a terrorist, so there is no defined threshold to determine whether an individual is at risk of being drawn into terrorism.” So there’s no nice straightforward “Terrorism risk: 13.6” readout.

Nonetheless, the same process is going on. A person comes into contact with the counterterrorism services. Of the 6,000 or so who are referred to Prevent each year, about 500 or so are deemed “vulnerable” to radicalisation and are passed on to a subgroup called “Channel”. 

Since referral to Channel is not based on an objective score, it’s based on a subjective feeling (or “expert judgment”): people will be flagged up if the panel judging them feels sufficiently strongly that they’re a risk. They might not explicitly say “Terrorism risk: 13.6”, but still, there is a threshold of risk, over which someone is considered a threat.

And just like the PSA levels in the blood, that assessment will be imperfect. If you read some young man saying something disturbing online, is it harmless anger and braggadocio, or are they a terrorist? You can raise your implicit threshold and avoid harassing innocent people, at the cost of an increased risk of missing a genuine terrorist, or you can lower it and correctly identify more terrorists, but at the cost of labelling a lot of harmless people as potential terrorists.

It might seem, like the cancer test in reverse, that there’s an asymmetry here: a false positive annoys people; a false negative kills people. But also like the cancer test, it’s not as simple as that. The false positives will be a lot more common than the false negatives — simply put, there are more mouthy non-terrorists than actual terrorists in the world. As I said before, there were 6,000 people referred to Prevent every year, and 500 or so were judged to be of sufficiently high risk to be passed on to Channel. But there have been only four actual terror attacks in the last two years. 

If you lower your threshold, raise the alarm on more borderline cases, then you will waste more police time, put more innocent people under needless scrutiny and stigmatise more communities. (It seems inevitable that a lowered threshold will mean more young Muslim men, in particular, being picked up by the security services.) That may be a price worth paying — but, let’s be clear, it will be a price that you pay. If you take in everybody suspicious for questioning — every misogynist loser on incel subreddits, every angry racist or radical Islamist on dark-web chatrooms — you may prevent one or two more attacks, but you will undoubtedly fill up your jails and enrage the populace.

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This doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. Moving your threshold is zero-sum. But you can change your test: if instead of testing for PSA you looked for some other marker, you might be able to tell whether someone had cancer with more accuracy. In the case of counter-terrorism, you could do things like increasing police funding for surveillance, rather than simply being more strict about your criteria — although of course that would mean less money elsewhere.

An alternative suggestion might be to abandon “expert judgment” and introduce something like I talked about above, an explicit algorithm: human judgment is famously terrible at predicting complex things like the likelihood of a criminal to reoffend, and algorithms consistently outperform us, as the psychologist Paul Meehl demonstrated way back in 1954. They beat humans at predicting the price of wine, how long a cancer patient will live, who will win a football match, how likely a business is to succeed and dozens of other subjects. It is likely that some fairly simple algorithm could do significantly better than the best experts at predicting who is a terror risk, as well.

But it could only ever be a partial improvement. Humans are stubbornly hard to predict. Part of the reason why algorithms can outperform human judgment in those fields is because human judgment is consistently terrible: we are very often wrong about who will reoffend, who will live and die, who will win a football match. It is not that algorithmic prediction is great; the future is still hard to know. However good we make our systems for detecting terrorists, they will never be very good. So terrible things will always happen, and when they do, we will assume our systems are too lax and need to be tightened.

It is tempting to think like that in the wake of an atrocity such as David Amess’s murder: to think that we ought to lower our thresholds of what counts as a risk. Perhaps it’s even true. But just as it is an unavoidable fact of reality that reducing false alarms means missing more real ones, a world in which Sir David’s murderer was caught ahead of time could be grimly authoritarian.

Martin Amis literally loved “multiracialism”. In the late Sixties, whatever race prejudice teenage Mart was lumbered with had been pantingly released. “At the time I had a Pakistani girlfriend, I had an Iranian girlfriend, I had a South African girlfriend, all of whom were Muslim… The Pakistani girl was just beginning to kind of Westernise. You would — I don’t know — just look at her and just feel eons between you.”

How had 1984’s best novelist pretzeled himself into this position? Forced to deal girlfriend receipts to a smarmy journalist, in order to prove he was not listing around the same weedy moral pond as a Klansman, or Nick Griffin?

Amis’s problem — like so many other problems — began at 9:03am on September 11 2001, when United Airlines Flight 175 was swallowed by the World Trade Center’s South Tower. As the dust, debris, and people rained eerily down on New York City that day, the outlines of this grand tragedy, and many more tragedies to come, for America, and for everyone else, could be discerned.

But it may have been an even bigger tragedy for our novelists. Or it seemed to feel that way to them. What were they supposed to do now? Write craftily about unhappy marriages when the world was curling at its edges?

In the days, weeks, and months after the attack, they filled the pages of newspapers and magazines, scrounging around for the right words. Salman Rushdie wrote of a “dreadful blow”, and the war to come: “We must send our shadow warriors against theirs.” John Updike wondered whether America could afford “the openness that lets future Kamikaze pilots, say, enrol in Florida flying schools”. (He reckoned America could.) A sage Jonathan Franzen suggested that this dreadful new world would have to rediscover “the ordinary, the trivial, and even the ridiculous”. Ian McEwan — somewhat strangely given the widespread sense of shock that day — accused the hijackers of a “failure of the imagination”. Zadie Smith felt sick: “Sick of sound of own voice. Sick of trying to make own voice appear on that white screen.” David Foster Wallace wrote a melancholy (even for him) essay about flags. A weepy, angry, depressed Jay McInerney was probably the most honest. He admitted to being glad he didn’t have a book coming out that month. The collective tone was nervous, eschatological, distressed. Novelists sounded, just this once, like everyone else.

Apart from Martin Amis. He continued to sound like Martin Amis: flashy, forceful, in-your-face. 9/11 was the “apotheosis of the postmodern era.” The collapse of the towers was the “majestic abjection of that double surrender”; the second jet was “terror revealed — the terror doubled, or squared”. He even minted a neologism (a very old Amis tick): “worldflash”.

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In retrospect, nobody writing for a living seemed more affected, more thwarted, more plainly knocked off his rocker that day than Amis. He took 9/11 very personally indeed. And spookily, like W.B. Yeats describing his youthful hatred of progress, in Amis’s September palpitations you can sense that he “felt a sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin”. He called it “the age of horrorism”. Then he called it “the age of vanished normalcy”. Which was it? He began to write for his entire profession: “After a couple of hours at their desks, on Sept. 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.”

It didn’t happen. Zadie Smith wrote her novels, so did Jonathan Franzen. John Updike wrote a terrible picaresque about terrorism (imaginatively called… Terrorist), then died shortly afterwards. Rushdie wrote creatively across genres. Ian McEwan would eventually seem far, far angrier about Brexit than he ever was about the attacks. There were few obvious changes in course; writers kept writing.

But Amis did change occupation, sort of. For an uneasy decade after 9/11, he transformed into a crusading polemicist, no longer a mere novelist. In lengthy essays for the Guardian and the Observer, eventually collected in The Second Plane (2008), Amis became the explainer-in-chief of “Islamism” to Britain’s liberal middle-classes. Given the trouble he would soon find himself in and the drubbings he would receive, it is difficult to work out why Amis thought this would be a good idea.

He was the best comic novelist in England, the hothouse of comic novelists. He accepted that his gift was for “banalities delivered with tremendous force”. Yet there was also a sense — one confirmed by the terrible reviews amassed by 2003’s Yellow Dog — that Amis was stuck with, and marooned in, his talent for macho-comedic wordplay. (Maybe this is why he had tried to change course once before in the Eighties, by writing plaintive non-fiction about nuclear weapons.) Shortly before 9/11, at Jonathan Cape’s launch party for Amis’s autobiography Experience (2000), his editor prophesied that this was “a book which would be read in 200 years time”. There is nothing wrong with hyperbole, and Experience is a good memoir, but even Amis might have suspected the difference between hype and truth here.

Political journalism about the fallout world that emerged after 9/11 would be different though. Here was a subject truly, finally big enough for his talent. Perhaps Amis saw a chance to write himself into History by writing about history — to write a book that really would be read in 200 years.

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The Second Plane, which is full of howlers, sweeping statements (“All religions are violent”; “Islam is totalist”), and ramblings, may well be read in 200 years’ time, but not in a way that would please Amis. His cavalier embrace of polemic — his decision to go out to bat, unasked, for the West in the 2000s — was a minor, yet telling, sideshow during the War on Terror era. In Amis we see the clumsy analysis of Islamism (born entirely of sexual frustration apparently) and Iran (the population there he thought, was “strongly if ambivalently pro-American”) that passed for commentary in that period. And Amis embraced pat comparisons of al-Qaeda with the Nazis, Stalinism, and the Khmer Rouge, which now look as if they were written to satisfy emotional, not intellectual needs.

In one essay Amis describes an abandoned novella, The Unknown Known. It imagined the story of Ayed, a “diminutive Islamist terrorist” who has the bright idea of ransacking “all the prisons and madhouses for every compulsive rapist in the country”, and releasing them in a small town in Colorado. Ayed is a potential rapist too, sexually curdled, standing beneath elevated walkways so “he could rail against the airiness of the summer frocks worn by American women and the shameless brevity of their underpants”. As a pervert of short-standing, whose icky yearnings are described in great detail, Ayed could have tumbled out of London Fields or any other Amis novel. The only difference is that Ayed is an Arab who has never seen the inside of a pub. Amis knew he was reissuing his old insights and insecurities like this, and he believed they reverberated even more strongly: “Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is.” But was it helpful, as the battle lines were being drawn, to believe that the West’s new foes were so many Ayed’s — mentally deranged death cultists, whose lives turned on the problems they had with girls? These caricatures belonged in novels. They made sense in novels, but now they were being passed off as an accurate representation of of the world and the people in it — and these, looked at properly, would always be ambiguous.

Literary critics called Amis “chuckleheaded” and compared him with “a man who sounds increasingly like the embarrassing uncle screaming at the television”. But Amis was not really in literary mode at all. He was simply ventriloquizing, as his friend Christopher Hitchens did, the establishment consensus in Washington and London at the time — that this was a struggle between good and evil, between modern civilisation and medieval barbarism. It’s plain now that there is a direct line — a “worldflash” even — between these recklessly simple ideas and the disaster that unfolded in Kabul last month.

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In the end though, it was not The Second Plane that forced Amis to detail his liaisons with Muslim girls in Sixties London. It was a grenade tossed in an interview in 2006, more explosive than anything he wrote elsewhere in this phase: “There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan.” Even Michel Houellebecq never went this far.

For this Terry Eagleton compared him to a “British National Party thug”. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown said Amis was “with the beasts” and “the Muslim baiters and haters”, making him a “threat to society”. Amis defended himself by discussing his sex life (“I was the first man she had ever kissed” etc.) and then retreated back to safer territory in the 2010s — another novel about the Holocaust, another novel about London. He would admit in 2012 that he “said something stupid” when he talked about collective punishment.

His pose changed. Amis seemed sadly self-aware. “I’m like Hugh Hefner” he told the Times in 2017. “When he started out, he was the hero of liberalism and then the culture changed. And he became the villain of liberalism.”

In his latest book, Inside Story, (a tricksy meander around the contours of his own life) his tone is gentle and generous and grandfatherly. It’s like he wants us to forget all the things he wrote and said after 9/11 — like George W Bush showing off the oil paintings he made of injured veterans on late night shows, with his please-forgive-me eyes.

Who would forgive Martin Amis? In his writing life he had always insisted that critics didn’t matter. “As you get older you realise that all these things — prizes, reviews, advances, readers — it’s all showbiz, and the real action starts with your obituary.” Only posterity counted, only 200 years hence as his editor put it, and Amis wanted to be remembered then. When the real action of remembering Amis begins, you almost hope for his sake, that his small and silly contribution to these 20 years of hubris will be forgotten.

As Biden observed, entirely correctly, “there’s nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more in this competition than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan”. Instead, he asserted, “this decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” Whatever the howls of outrage from America’s prestige opinion pages, the age of liberal imperialism is over: the time of nakedly realist great power competition has begun.

Yet Biden’s worldview, so outrageous for an American commentariat as recklessly jingoistic as John Bull magazine in its Edwardian prime, is supported by analysis from an unexpected quarter: that of the architect himself of both America’s War on Terror, and of the great slaughter in New York that precipitated it, Osama bin Laden.

Piecing together the themes of bin Laden’s various statements to the outside world in the years immediately before and after 9/11, a specific, concrete plan emerges, by which the “slave of God” — as the billionaire son of a Yemen-born construction magnate styled himself — would accelerate the collapse of the American empire through embroiling it in long, unwinnable and expensive ground wars in the Islamic world. This plan, bin Laden claimed, had formulated itself through his experience of the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, whose ignominious withdrawal from the country had shortly preceded their imperial collapse, events in which he himself had played a relatively undistinguished part.

In an interview conducted a month and a half after 9/11, bin Laden observed that:

“the Soviet Empire has become — with God’s grace — a figment of the imagination. Today, there is no more Soviet Empire; it split into smaller states and only Russia is left… So we believe that the defeat of America is something achievable — with the permission of God — and it is easier for us — with the permission of God — than the defeat of the Soviet Empire previously.”

Why would it be easier, asked the journalist, al Jazeera’s then-star reporter Taysir Alluni incredulously? Because, bin Laden replied, “we have already fought them — like our brothers who have engaged in battle with the Americans, as in Somalia. We have not yet found a significant force of note. There is a great aura about America, which it uses to scare people before it engages in battle.”

But, he claimed, the brief and inglorious American episode in Somalia showed that American power could not stretch to imposing order on insurgent forces far from home: “America left, dragging behind it tails of humiliation, defeat, and loss, without looking back; it retreated unexpectedly, and it forgot all that great media enthusiasm about the New World Order, and how it was the master of that order, and could do whatever it pleased.”

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This was not the first time bin Laden had used the example of Somalia to persuade sceptics of the logic underlying his plan. In his first interview with al-Jazeera three years earlier, after al-Qaeda’s twin bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which had killed more than 200 people, bin Laden noted that:

“We believe that America is much weaker than Russia, and we have learned from our brothers who fought in the jihad in Somalia of the incredible weakness and cowardice of the American soldier. Not even eighty of them had been killed and they fled in total darkness in the middle of the night, unable to see a thing.”

Even before then, in a 1997 interview with CNN journalist Peter Arnett, bin Laden noted that in Somalia, “after a little resistance, the American troops left after achieving nothing. They left after claiming that they were the largest power on earth. They left after some resistance from powerless, poor, unarmed people whose only weapon is the belief in God Almighty, and who do not fear the fabricated American media lies.”

Indeed, he added, claiming dubiously that veterans of the Afghan jihad had fought against the Americans in Somalia, “We learned from those who fought there, that they were surprised to see the low spiritual morale of the American fighters in comparison with the experience they had with the Russian fighters. The Americans ran away from those fighters who fought and killed them, while the latter stayed.”

In choosing Afghanistan as the location for the war with the United States which would, he believed, bring about its decline, bin Laden embroiled the Afghan people in a conflict not of their choosing, doubling the length of their civil war by another twenty years and inflating its butchers’ bill by 46,000 civilian deaths alone. And yet, with the easy confidence of a billionaire, he told Afghans in a video message that their sacrifice was worth it — and that “whoever doubts this should learn from the Russians how the blessed jihad destroyed their myth.” Because, bin Laden claimed, “the struggle is both financial and physical” so that even as the Taliban reeled under American bombing, “it is possible to strike the economic base that is the foundation of the military base, so when their economy is depleted they will be too busy with each other to be able to enslave poor peoples.”

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The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

This emphasis on the War on Terror as a giant, entrapping money pit for the American empire runs throughout bin Laden’s messages. In his 2002 Letter to the American People, bin Laden taunted the inhabitants of “the worst civilisation witnessed by the history of mankind” that “it was easy for us to provoke this administration and lure it into perdition. All we had to do was send two mujahidin to the Far East to raise up a rag on which “al-Qaeda” was written, and the generals came running. This inflicted human, financial, and political losses on America without them even achieving anything worth mentioning, apart from providing business for their private corporations.”

Indeed, in his critique of America’s conversion of the War on Terror into a vast and lucrative wealth-creation scheme for the military-industrial complex, bin Laden either echoes or prefigures the identical critiques of American anti-interventionists of both Left and Right, from Bernie Sanders to Trump’s previous, anti-interventionist incarnation.

As bin Laden boasted, the massive borrowing needed to finance the wars “truly shows that al-Qaeda has made gains, but on the other hand it also shows that the Bush administration has likewise profited. Anyone seeing the enormity of the contracts won by dubious large corporations, like Halliburton and others connected to Bush and his administration, can be certain of that. But the reality is that it is you, the American people and your economy, who are losing.” For “we are continuing to make America bleed to the point of bankruptcy, by God’s will,” he asserted.

Yet it was only the presence of America’s then-Republican government, surely a gift from God, which enabled this situation: “the White House leadership, which is so keen to open up war fronts for its various corporations, whether in the field of arms, oil, or construction, has also contributed to these remarkable results for al-Qaeda.” Indeed, he mocked, “to some analysts and diplomats, it seems as if we and the White House are on the same team shooting at the United States’s own goal, despite our different intentions.”

No wonder, then, that Biden has similarly invoked the vast cost of the wars — two trillion dollars in his estimate — in bringing about their end. But even this colossal sum may be an understatement. As Fortune noted recently, this figure does not include the interest payments on the loans taken out to prosecute the war, nor the benefits paid to the survivors of the more than 7,000 American dead. Nor does it include perhaps the greatest single expense: the medical bills for the war’s more than 50,000 wounded veterans, which may alone total $2.3 trillion by 2050.

All told, claims Fortune, citing Brown University’s Costs of War project, the real bill of the War on Terror, including the lesser engagements in Yemen and Syria, may end up closer to eight trillion dollars, the effect of which American taxpayers have not yet faced, as “almost the entire cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars has come from borrowed money, much of which has yet to be repaid”.

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A French lesson for Blair and Bush

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Among America’s creditors is, of course, China, which made use of the West’s overriding distraction with winning over mountain village chieftains in the wilds of Afghanistan, with trying and failing to install a functioning liberal democracy in Iraq and then with destroying the Islamic State caliphate the invasion spawned to accelerate its rise to global industrial dominance. It is surely no accident that only now that the War on Terror is winding down, competition with China has finally intruded into the American foreign policy consciousness, despite being mocked as eccentric or even racist when expressed by then-presidential candidate Trump as the empire’s overriding challenge.

Even in the new Cold War over infrastructure and state capacity, perhaps the battleground on which wavering nations will be competed for, the money wasted on the failed wars in Asia could, as the Institute of Policy Studies thinktank observes, “have solved multiple problems in the U.S., like erasing all student debt for $1.7 trillion [or] decarbonizing the entire electricity grid for $4.5 trillion.”

But we are where we are. The twenty failed years of war, debt and distraction may not yet have led to America’s collapse in the manner bin Laden eagerly anticipated, but it certainly set the then-sole superpower at a disadvantage in preparing for the coming competition over its right to global hegemony. As Biden noted in his speech announcing the withdrawal, abandoning the Afghan adventure was necessary because “we need to focus on shoring up America’s core strengths to meet the strategic competition with China and other nations that is really going to determine our future.” Returning to this theme in his speech justifying the chaotic scenes in Kabul, he reiterated that “the world is changing. We’re engaged in a serious competition with China… We have to shore up America’s competitiveness to meet these new challenges in the competition for the 21st century,” and “as we turn the page on the foreign policy that has guided our nation the last two decades, we’ve got to learn from our mistakes.”

But can America do so? Their foreign policy establishment certainly seems averse to learning any lessons from two decades of failure, even if ordinary voters overwhelmingly support Biden’s diminution of America’s historical mission. It is not obvious that a GOP establishment responsible for the manifold strategic disasters of the twenty-year war can legitimately criticise Biden’s decision to end it, especially not when its last president rode to power partly on the same platform.

Yet even bin Laden’s purported killer, a SEAL operative-turned conservative talkshow celebrity and anti-masking activist, maintains his brand by asserting that “It baffles me right now that we’re even considering negotiating with the Taliban … Why don’t we just go kill them?” — to the applause of American conservatives who applauded Trump’s anti-interventionism just as passionately when the random spinning wheel of America’s culture war was calibrated to reward different incentives.

For al-Qaeda itself, America’s endless internal political conflict, its deepest malaise, is nothing but a cause for crowing celebration. In a recent propaganda video, America Burns, an adaptation of a previous magazine article, al-Qaeda surveyed the American political scene, crowing at the internal divisions of a “decaying polity” on the “verge of collapse”. In al-Qaeda’s framing, America is teetering on the edge of civil war. Its vast security apparatus has increasingly been directed onto American voters themselves as the combination of crude populism and the reactive collusion between the security state and “the liberal press that controls the American media industry” raised the country’s tensions to boiling point. As a consequence, America’s “usury-based economy” is merely “an inflated balloon ready to implode”, serving only “the corporate robber barons” and “Communist China.” Indeed, they boast, “It was Allah’s wisdom that the fourth plane whose downing was ordered by Dick Cheney on the 11th of September did not reach its target, and Americans were left to destroy the edifice of their democracy with their own hands.”

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How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

So what can be said of America’s standing twenty years after 9/11? Strategically, the hegemon appears a strange oxymoron, a global military empire which cannot win wars. It can kill hundreds of thousands of people and cause untold destruction — generally with the very best and noblest of intentions — but is seemingly unable to deploy the overwhelming military force on which its global position depends in a way that advances its interests. Given its military caste was unable even to manage a bloodless withdrawal from an airfield it controlled under a timetable it itself set, who can bet confidently that they would emerge the victor from a struggle against a competent and prepared near-peer adversary like China?

Only a reckless gambler, or the British government, would be happy with such a high-stakes throw of the dice. Politically, America’s divisions are a cautionary tale rather than an example to the world it still claims to lead; if the US still retains its status as the global standard-bearer for liberal democracy, then liberal democracy is not as enticing a prospect as it once appeared.

Yet America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, like the withdrawal from Iraq — which, after a decent interval to avoid the appearance of being pushed out by the Iranian-backed militias the war empowered, seems certain to follow — does not herald the end of American power. It was the wars themselves that were the trap, as bin Laden made clear time and time again, and their ending is a necessary moment of rebalancing to focus on the far greater challenge ahead. In this, we can say Biden was the president the American empire needed, even if his supporters didn’t realise that was what they were getting: a cautious realist brought to power by a liberal-imperialist establishment, and a broadly competent manager of retrenchment, and objective decline.

It is therefore wrong to claim — as Tom Tugendhat and others have — that the withdrawal from Afghanistan is America’s Suez moment, not least because Suez was a military victory for Britain. It would be more apt to view it as America’s Singapore, a failure of planning and overconfidence which heralded the collapse of imperial power in vast swathes of Asia, yet a moral and psychological defeat more than a terminal strategic one. The Suez moment, if it comes, still lies over the horizon.

The lustre of the American empire has been tarnished, but the core underlying structure may hold good for decades yet; if America has lost its claims to global leadership, it has also lost its desire to press them. In abandoning America’s failing wars to focus on its decaying infrastructure and the great power competition that will now define its future, Biden has, perhaps, twenty years after the carnage of 9/11, finally exorcised bin Laden’s ghost.

Meanwhile, the members of an al Qaeda cell were plotting.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were believed by many at the time to have awakened America from the post-historical fantasies of the 1990s. “We have been called out of our trivial concerns,” declared an editorial from September 19, 2001 in The Weekly Standard, the influential neoconservative publication known as “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One”. This was a prominent attitude and not confined to the Right. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, in an interview published the day before, declared “the end of the age of irony” and predicted that “things that were considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear”.

Twenty years later, the Taliban’s predictable takeover of Afghanistan is the final crushing defeat of America’s post-9/11 calling as the armed evangelist of global democracy. Instead of spreading the gifts of liberty to the Middle East, the crusading policy of the past two decades collapsed the guardrails of liberal democracy at home, undermined its appeal abroad and wasted America’s strategic power while enriching its ruling class.

Over those same years, the infrastructure of the War on Terror achieved a revolutionary transformation of the global order; albeit one altogether different from the liberalising mission it heralded. From the start, US intelligence agencies argued that the Internet comprised the key terrain of 21^st-century warfare and only by controlling it could they prevent another “intelligence failure” like the one blamed for the al Qaeda attacks in 2001. The unprecedented rise of Google, Facebook and Amazon, as hegemons of the new digital order in which “real life” is what takes place online, is in part the story of the American security establishment outsourcing its surveillance project to private information monopolies. In the process, the emerging digital economy amassed the greatest concentration of wealth in human history, while helping to systematically dismantle the American middle class and with it those institutions like the free press that made liberal democracy possible.

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We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

The Weekly Standard editorial from September 19th continues in the next line: “We have resigned our parts in the casual comedy of everyday existence. We live for the first time since World War II, with a horizon once again.” You couldn’t look at the carnage in downtown New York and the Potomac without seeing that the US had enemies who were both determined and savage. Salafist-jihadism is a millenarian cult, an authentic expression of Islamic fundamentalism and an ultra-modern totalitarian ideology. Formulating an effective response to networked and state-aligned terrorism that matched the severity of the threat without overstating its significance was not an easy task — which is why so many people got it wrong.

But the answer given by people with the President’s ear, to elevate the terrorist attack to mythological significance as the event that restored a lost horizon, set the mould for a naive triumphalism that led directly to Iraq and twenty years of delusion and defeat in Afghanistan.

Not everyone held such views, of course. There was some dissent even within the D.C. Beltway. But the Standard’s Republican version of Wilsonian Neoconservatism, which shared with the Democrats’ liberal interventionism almost everything but its cultural and stylistic tics, was the purest expression of a prevailing attitude in the American political and media classes. In a nation that had grown too comfortable and complacent, global jihadism offered a civilisational challenge. Our Islamist enemy would call forth a new “national greatness” in the American character, wrote the New York Times’ David Brooks.

The authors of this vision were nearly all baby boomers. Their call to forge a new generation’s greatness in battle against “Islamofascism” was a self-conscious attempt to recreate the heroic national destiny they had grown up venerating in the shadow of the Second World War. It was an understandable response to the strength and nobility of their fathers’ generation, but a fatal blueprint for American foreign policy.

This new call to arms was not purely a response to 9/11. One important source text was written in the summer of 1996 while Bill Clinton was in office. Together, the Weekly Standard’s editor William Kristol and fellow influential neoconservative Robert Kagan co-authored an essay in which they developed ideas that would inform George W. Bush’s vision for the world, especially the “freedom agenda” put forth in his second inaugural address. The article lamented the “tepid consensus” that had taken hold after Ronald Reagan left office among conservatives who accepted a diminished role for America in global affairs.

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The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

Against what they called “the pinched nationalism” of Patrick Buchanan’s “America First” foreign policy, the authors presented a true “conservatism of the heart”. Under this maudlin title, they enumerated their aims: “To emphasize both personal and national responsibility, relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking in American foreign policy.”

Perhaps I was too young to appreciate it at the time — certainly I was too caught up in my own anger and patriotic furore, which involved enlisting in the military in 2002 — but some 20 years later, the overwrought boyishness of these programmes for the making of “great men” makes for painful reading. In the pages of The New Republic, the emotionally precocious Peter Beinart championed a politics of “muscular liberalism”. Beinart’s twee recreation of historical mission was captured in his 2006 book arguing for why “Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.”

So what did we get for all this talk of revived greatness and reborn heroism? We got Bush, the boyish president whose reputation for mangling the English language could never account for his genuine knack for grandiloquent oratory. We got Rumsfeld and Cheney, who were not quite the Strangelovian villains of lore, mostly because they were less cinematic in their foibles and more grubby and desperate. We got a new techno-Calvinist social dispensation and a permanent state of exception that blurs the line between terrorism and disease. We got generations of military generals who have been, with few exceptions, glorified hangers for uniforms overweighted with cheapened medals.

American soldiers who fought with honour know all too well that the heroism of our peers was a private affair, shared between comrades. There was nothing larger in it. No national greatness or unifying purpose. Any contact we had with real heroism only widened the gulf between us and our fellow citizens.

All in all, this quest has been a tragic disappointment. Rather than enlarging the stature of Americans, the effort to manufacture greatness had a miniaturising effect. Everything it touched became not only less heroic but less human. We wanted greatness, but we got simulations.

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How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

Meanwhile, in the same years that the measure of man was being stunted, another type of anti-heroism — this time in a technological form — was coming to rule over the planet. Even before the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, the budding War on Terror had already begun to metastasise into a permanent bureaucracy. Word of the “Total Information Awareness” (TIA) programme was leaked to the New York Times, which reported on the initiative in 2002 while it was still in development.

Headed up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), TIA intended to create a universal data mining system in which every kind of information ever collected on a person would be collated in one database. US authorities could then query and analyse the data — which, properly interpreted, would contain a composite portrait of every individual alive — with algorithms designed to detect patterns identified with criminals and terrorists. For its logo the group chose the eye of providence, that always reassuring image from the one-dollar bill of an eyeball floating at the apex of a pyramid.

Once word got out about TIA, a backlash ensued led by both legislators and civil liberties groups and the programme was shut down. But what we now know — thanks to Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013 — is that TIA didn’t end when the Government shut it down; it just took on new names as it spread far outside its origins at DARPA. Within the US government, TIA was a direct forerunner to the National Security Agency’s secret efforts known as PRISM to collect bulk data and spy on Americans’ communications. Just this past April, it was revealed that the US postal office was running a secret programme to monitor Americans’ social media activity for signs of “extremism” that would then be passed on to other federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. As a specific office TIA is gone, but the principle that unconstitutional spying on Americans’ private behaviour is only limited by the possibility of getting caught lives on.

The true heirs to the Government’s efforts at total information control are companies like Google and Facebook whose businesses are based on luring people in with free services in order to extract their user data. In her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff describes how the “state of exception” created by the Government use of special extra-legal prerogatives in the aftermath of 9/11 “favored Google’s growth and the successful elaboration of its surveillance-based logic of accumulation”. In other words, why would US intelligence agencies run their own collection programmes and have to worry about political scandals and Congressional oversight when they can just allow private companies to cast a legal surveillance net over the entire globe and then tap into the servers on the backend, like they did with PRISM.

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Washington was gripped by fear

By Justin Webb

In 2000, the year the tech bubble burst, there was a burgeoning effort in the US government, led by the Federal Trade Commission, to regulate the Internet and protect users’ privacy. Zuboff details how that came to an abrupt end after 9/11 as, “the elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity: surveillance exceptionalism”.

Exactly 20 years after the survey that found “Optimism Reigns, Technology Plays Key Role,” Pew conducted another survey in 2019. Too much has happened to reduce its findings to any one cause, but its headline gives one indication of the direction that change took in the post 9/11 era: “Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts: Majorities predict a weaker economy, a growing income divide, a degraded environment and a broken political system.”

The soaring rhetoric employed by the architects of post-9/11 US policy promised to restore a classical grandeur to American democracy that had supposedly been lost in the “end of history” Nineties. Instead, they undermined its foundations and launched the United States into the anti-heroic era of human-bots, social automation and authoritarian technocracy.

These two incidents were connected by neither geography, subject matter, or substance; the first was a tense but ultimately toothless conflict between two neurotic New Yorkers in which nobody got hurt, while the second captured not just a horrific tragedy but a gross abuse of police power. It didn’t matter: within hours, the two viral moments had fused in the public consciousness to create a monster, literally. She was a boogeyman spawned on social media, one we loathed and feared in equal measure.

And because we live in the age of movies spawned by memes, she’s coming soon to a cinema near you. A bedraggled and atrociously-hairstyled Taryn Manning will be playing a villainous white woman who antagonises the sweet and blameless black family who’s just moved in down the street. She’s the embodiment of all evil, the manager-calling bigot next door, the proud owner of a soap dispenser emblazoned with the confederate flag. Her name, of course — and the movie’s — is Karen.

You don’t have to see Karen (and based on the trailer, it looks like a pile of hot garbage) to know how it will end: the villainess will come to a brutally but suitably violent end, and we’ll all learn an important, even life-changing lesson about embracing diversity and equity — lest one end up disemboweled by a wine opener.

Manning herself believes that Karen will pack a powerful, even global punch: “I felt a social responsibility to take on this role,” she told Deadline. “Even if I had to play the villain to effect change around the globe, then I was more than willing to step into the role… It’s time for change, and for me to be a part of the bigger picture meant a lot to me.”

Alas, Hollywood has but one “Karen” to cast. But for white women who yearn to effect change by embracing their own inner villain, two new books offer a way forward. Nova Reid’s The Good Ally and Rafia Zakaria’s Against White Feminism, both published this month, invite white women everywhere into a new, exciting role: that of the bad guy.

“I felt like I was being eaten alive by a pack of wolves,” Reid writes early on in her book. But the feeding frenzy she describes isn’t a brutal, racist attack; it’s how she felt after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, fielding calls and emails from people who wanted to hire her as a diversity consultant. The tragedy in Minneapolis triggered an international wave of reckoning, and being recognised as an expert in her field, people turned to Reid for help. And those wolves? White women. Entitled, hungry, snarling.

The white feminist antagonist, inflicting countless harms in her desperation to do good appears in both Reid and Zakaria’s books — but it’s in Against White Feminism that the critique is sharpened to a point. Not that readers should feel attacked, mind you — “White women must not feel that the critique of whiteness within feminism is some crude intimidation tactic meant to silence them altogether,” Zakaria writes, even as she insists on the importance of denouncing “those who cling to exclusionary histories, stories, and forms”. (So, you may be denounced, but don’t let it intimidate you.) Reid, meanwhile, assures her reader: “Any discomfort you feel is temporary and pales in comparison to what Black people and People of Colour often have to experience on a daily basis.”

In reading these books, Reid and Zakaria become an omniscient authority, one who has never met you but knows you better than you know yourself. Zakaria explains that people of colour understand white women fluently, as a matter of necessity: this is the natural outgrowth of “the need to survive in a white-run world”. In practice, this means that Zakaria spends much of the book ascribing intent and motive to the behaviours of various white women; needless to say, her interpretation is not flattering.

White women’s reactions — or in some cases, what Zakaria imagines those reactions might be — are presented in turn as expressions of fragility, of defensiveness, of grasping hunger for power. For instance, Zakaria was married young to an abusive husband, a terrible situation from which she ultimately fled. But when the opportunity comes to tell this story to a group of friends, she assumes that this is beyond the scope of any white woman’s experience. In fact, she doesn’t tell the story at all, lest the other women “demote me mentally below the women who do the real work of feminism”.

“I know that my companions’ world is split into women of colour who have ‘stories’ to tell, and white women who have power and an inherently feminist outlook,” she writes. Remarkably, she’s so certain of this she never actually tests her hypothesis; instead she tells a shortened version of her life story and then quietly resents her friends for the rest of the night, first for their imagined lack of empathy, and then for failing to notice when she pays more than her fair share of the bill. (Zakaria, unlike her “prettily dressed, slightly soused, fashionably woke” companions, had refrained from drinking — a decision for which she also imagines she’s being judged.)

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Zakaria is deeply suspicious of white women, perhaps reasonably so, but it’s hard to separate her historical analysis of white feminism from the grudges that animate the book’s more personal sections. Her anecdotes often include snide observations about other women’s physical appearances; Zakaria is antagonised by a “smug white professor” seen “duly sporting the scarves and baubles of the well-travelled,” or a “willowy blonde” with her hair in braids. And while she assures us that white women need not feel attacked, this may prove difficult even for the most open-minded reader; the words “white women” appear in Zakaria’s book 161 times (the book is 245 pages long.)

Sometimes, the entire case for this or that thing being fundamentally “white feminist” seems to rest on the presence of an individual white woman somewhere in the equation. One chapter, titled “White Feminists and Feminist Wars,” seeks to frame the War on Terror as a white feminist exercise primarily through the lens of Zero Dark Thirty, the movie about the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and its female CIA agent, Maya, who was instrumental in the operation’s success.

Here, too, Zakaria’s personal experience ends up dominating the narrative. She dwells at length on the screening she attended of Zero Dark Thirty at a movie theater in Indiana, where the crowd “repeatedly cheered” at the sight of “a brown man being waterboarded”, then gave the movie a standing ovation while Zakaria wept despondently in her seat. (Sidenote: I know the notion of a bunch of red-state yokels cheering for torture scenes before leaping to its feet to applaud the end of Zero Dark Thirty — in fact a pretty meditative work that in no way glamorises or glosses over the horrors of the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden — may hew believably to certain ugly stereotypes about the American midwest, but if you’ve ever actually seen a movie in the US, this scene is so out of keeping with how audiences usually behave that it’s hard to believe it’s entirely factual.)

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Amid this myopic focus on a fictional CIA agent and a handful of real-life female soldiers, one could almost forget that the American war on terror was enacted, strategised and fought almost exclusively by men. And indeed, overlooking the role of men in lieu of vilifying white women is a recurrent theme in Against White Feminism. In one chapter, Zakaria blames “self-declared feminists” after an article she wrote for Dissent magazine is met with an Islamophobic response — even though the ugly backlash was apparently fuelled by a male editor.

In another, she recounts showing up to an event that was billed to her as a speaking engagement, but turned out, humiliatingly, to be a sort of global bazaar at which she was supposed to man a table of Pakistani handicrafts. Zakaria was urged to attend by two friends, both men, who evidently misinformed her about the nature of the event — but rather than blame them, her contempt falls squarely on the women in attendance. She rages at the organisers, at the white women drinking wine and buying crafts, and particularly at the “Black and brown women doing the bidding of my handler and others of her kind”.

Zakaria is at her strongest when she zooms out to a systemic distance, such as critiquing misguided efforts to support women overseas, where a lack of cultural literacy led to interventions that were more intrusive than useful. But even as Zakaria reasonably criticises various movements for “imposing the goals of white, Western feminists upon women who were neither white nor Western and did not necessarily share their concerns”, the bad actors at fault were massive organisations: the UN Global Alliance for Clean Stoves in one case, the Gates Foundation in another.

And in some cases, her anger at the “dictatorial feminism” practised by these would-be do-gooders is oddly reminiscent of the right-wing critiques that have lately proliferated surrounding the failed American operation in Afghanistan: both Zakaria and Tucker Carlson have similar things to say about the usefulness of neoliberalism in a nation ruled by tribal politics and religion, and its attempted imposition of Western gender roles on Afghan women. At any rate, it’s hard to see what the individual white women who make up her readership are meant to do with this information.

So, where does this leave Karen?

Out of commission, probably. If she reads Against White Feminism, she’ll be too busy wallowing neck-deep in self-flagellating guilt to get busy making a difference, or indeed even have the faintest idea how she’d begin to do so. If she takes the advice of The Good Ally, she’ll be journaling through her awokening with the evangelical zeal of the alcoholic trying to white-knuckle his way through the early days of sobriety (“The magnetic undercurrent of white supremacy is a force to be reckoned with and will tempt you to go back to your comfort zone when it gets too hard,” Reid warns.) Neither book offers concrete solutions; indeed, one gets the impression that asking for them would be just another expression of white feminist entitlement.

But that’s fine. Readers don’t buy these books because they want to be efficient activists. They buy them to marinate in the vision they sell — because while white feminism probably isn’t to blame for every last one of the world’s ills, there’s a particular breed of guilty white liberal woman quite eager to believe it is. Maybe it’s because, if you look at it just right, it suggests a victory of sorts: that feminism has moved beyond mere empowerment and into the realm of actual power, that some women have shed the mantle of victims to become formidable villains in their own right. After all, women can’t ever be truly equal to men until we’ve not only achieved power, but abused it, using it to crush those beneath us. Orwell once said that “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

These books take that picture to the next level: imagine the exhilarating power of having your own dainty foot inside the boot.

Ashraf, the father, was the country’s last president. A trained anthropologist, he believed in books, and the power of the ideas within them to move the world. His wife, Rula, a student in Paris in 1968, said she believed in women. Mariam, their daughter, became a filmmaker — she believed in Art. Their son, Tarek, believed in his father. His two-decade career in American academia and philanthropy is an echo of Ashraf’s own cloudless trajectory through blue-chip universities, the World Bank and think tanks. It was a tribute.

For half a century, Afghanistan was simultaneously obscure and at the centre of world events. It had swallowed the fading comet tail of the USSR and absorbed the late afternoon light of American Empire. It had been a hideaway for renegades and a bazaar of ideologies. From Hippie free love to political Islamism, from Marxist-Leninism to market democracy — all had been hawked and bartered over in Afghanistan.

Whether it was itself a “real” country at all, or simply a vast outdoor laboratory worked by imperial meddlers and narco-criminals was hard to say. But every force and idea that acted on Afghanistan acted on the Ghanis too. They were both the victims of events and the instigators of them. They had been exiles, then leaders; they had been scattered across the globe and enthroned in Kabul. The family was Pashtun, and prominent, with a history of political influence. The Ghanis first left in 1977, as the communists began their takeover.

Ashraf Ghani fled again this week. Mariam posted about it — “I’m pretty burned out” — on Instagram from her home in New York. Tarek and Rula have so far remained silent. This time it was widely reported that Ashraf had attempted to upholster four cars and a helicopter with millions of stolen dollars. This was surely — hopefully — untrue, and not because the source was a Russian news agency.

By Afghan standards the Ghanis were not that corrupt. It was for other politicians to mainline America’s billions into lavish compounds, or to be apprehended in Dubai’s airport with $52 million in cash. Ashraf did not believe in money. He believed in books.

When he became President, in 2014, after a fraught and nervous election, he indulged his obsession. Like all Afghan presidents, Ghani moved to the Arg — a labyrinth of palaces within a 19^th-century fortress in central Kabul. But unlike his predecessor, he immediately set about restoring the ruined royal library, with all its decaying antique volumes. His personal library was his most valuable asset, according to a New Yorker profile. He owned seven thousand books. Every day he woke up before the sun rose and read them under his favourite chinar tree. He would have taken his volumes, not cash, when he fled on Sunday, wouldn’t he?

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Can the Taliban bring peace?

By Aris Roussinos

Ghani didn’t just read books — he wrote them. With his collaborator, the British human rights lawyer Claire Lockhart, he published Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World (2008). “Novel strategies” were needed, they argued, to stabilise failed states that were contaminating “our fully globalised world” with anarchy.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, these chaotic zones were spreading. Ghani believed he had the ideas — a “sovereignty index” to be annually published by the UN, and a “citizens-based approach” to state-building — that could mop away the disorder. Fixing Failed States offered, according to a small review in Foreign Affairs, “a surprisingly hopeful vision”.

The vision was delivered as a TED talk in 2007. Ghani’s manner is cerebral, candid, impish, shrilly excitable — theory excites him. His voice is as squeaky as an old floorboard being stepped on. The TED stage suited a pedagogue like Ghani. It was not so different from the lecture halls and seminar rooms of John Hopkins, where he’d spent the 1980s teaching. He never looks uncomfortable.

America was comfortable enough for the Ghanis. It was their main chance, as it was for other exiled Afghans. It gave Ashraf, Rula and Tarek the opportunity to collect the academic prizes that are today’s proof of intelligence and moral worth. It allowed Mariam to transform herself from the child of exiles to an artist; not merely an artist working in “installation, performance, photography, text and video”, but, according to the Guggenheim Foundation, an “activist, archivist, writer and lecturer”.

A 2015 New York Times profile found Mariam in her loft apartment in Clinton Hill, worrying about being “a Brooklyn cliche”. The Times sketched her “as well-versed in the politics of extraordinary rendition as she is in the very Brooklyn pursuit of homemade chile-passion-fruit sorbet”.

Mariam’s work was exhibited at Tate Modern in London, and the Guggenheim and MOMA in New York. One exhibit, “Afghanistan: A Lexicon”, was made in collaboration with Ashraf over Skype. Over 72 panels of text and photos created by the Ghanis, the history of Afghanistan is shown to be cyclical — an endless rotation of invasion, revolt, reform, collapse and recovery. A country cruelly frozen in dynamism.

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She made films about the discovery of oil in Norway, and the melancholy difficulties of translation. She was born in New York, but identified “most with the border”. What Edward Said called the “essential sadness” of exile was there in Mariam, and in all her family. Perhaps that’s why the “Lexicon” had one telling absence from its story — the Ghanis themselves.

Ashraf had returned to the country with Rula in 2002 almost as soon as the Taliban were banished. First a finance minister under Hamid Karzai, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency in 2009, and then the winner of that disputed election in 2014.

Afghanistan was a problem for the family in a way that America — where they had flourished — was not. America only needed Ashraf’s theories in the classroom. Afghanistan, Ashraf believed, could be saved by his theories. It was all in his book, and his TED talk. Opium farmers would make t-shirts. Embroiders in Kandahar would partner with Versace. Guns would become ploughshares. One day the daughters of Afghanistan would be like his own, free to study in America; free to make jam in Brooklyn; free to exhibit their work in Berlin.

Afghans were not fools. They only needed jobs. The people, Ghani said in 2005, were internationalist by temperament — “they’re much more sophisticated than rural Americans with college degrees and the bulk of Europeans.” Well, perhaps.

Becoming President gave Ghani the chance to govern the country that shone in his mind. Afghans would learn about sheep raising from New Zealand, and hydroelectricity from the Swiss. Afghanistan was a blank slate. Ghani began to doodle his beautiful diagrams on it.

Sigmund Freud once said there were two “impossible professions”: education and government. Ghani was a wonderful educator. He proved to be an impossible President. He micromanaged his illusions and his staff. He took anger management classes.

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Why was he so angry? Was it the pressure — grinding and invidious — of watching his theories of the state become exposed as just another exile’s hopeless fictions?

Either way, he grew ever more solitary behind the blast walls, barbed wire, and checkpoints of the Arg. The library was his succour and support — one journalist described Ghani’s office, filled with open books on every surface, marked neatly with pencil annotations. This is what most intellectuals (quite rightly) do in a crisis. They retreat, like Michel de Montaigne did during the 16th century French wars of religion, to brood in their towers and libraries, hoping that solitude will yield new ideas. Montaigne, though, only advised the king of France, he had no pretensions to power itself; Ghani was supposed to be something like the king of Afghanistan.

At least, as everyone said, he was not corrupt. That was a blessing in a country where the MPs alone ritualistically stole over a billion dollars a year. But there was the rest of the family. Ashraf’s brother, Hashmat, and his nephew Sultan.

Hashmat will be remembered, not for driving a bulletproof Mercedes Limousine, or the 23,000 square feet of his Kabul home, but for the SOSi scandal. It was extraordinarily complicated; it involved hugely valuable rights to mineral deposits in Kunar province, illegal links between US special forces and militias — and the Ghani family. It was Hashmat who owned significant shares in the US company that wanted to buy the rights to the minerals, and it was President Ghani who signed off on the deal. Was it corrupt? “If there was a colour redder than red, that’s what colour this red flag would be,” said one American expert in procurement law.

Sultan, meanwhile, styled himself the President of ‘The Ghani Group’ on LinkedIn, and the co-founder of ‘The Institute for Afghan Women’ on his website.  As the country started to tremble a few weeks ago, he shared photos of himself on Instagram walking towards a Learjet 75 Liberty.

Ashraf had promised to clean up grift when he first ran for President, but if it flourished in his immediate family, what hope did Afghanistan have?

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When Ghani fled on Sunday he left behind half the population in poverty, a third of the population facing emergency levels of food insecurity, stagnant GDP, a massive trade deficit, a restive and furious countryside, and, in the words of one report, “a largely lawless, weak, and dysfunctional state”. Now the Taliban control it, down to the very last bumper car.

A few days before, Mariam Ghani’s latest film had its theatrical release in the United States. It’s title? What We Left Unfinished. For Ashraf — intellectual and politician, then, at last, a corrupted idealist — it was all unfinished.

How shocked, how distressed he looked, when he surfaced this week in the UAE, exiled once more. When his security team extracted him, he said, he was “in a condition where I couldn’t even put on my shoes”. Did Ashraf Ghani realise that the things he put his faith in, the codes by which he lived his life — ideas and books, globalisation and rational governance — had been diminished? That if the reports were true, and he really had left the country, not with his library, but with $169 million dollars, that he had maimed his life’s work, as well as Afghanistan?

Maybe he knew. All year, until almost the very end, he had promised his army could hold out against the Taliban, “forever“. But there was lucidity amidst the delusion.

“The future will be determined by the people of Afghanistan,” he told the BBC in February, “not by somebody sitting behind the desk, dreaming.”

He was wrong about the people of Afghanistan. Whether they stayed or fled, they would still be dragged into the conflicts of others. But he was right about the dreamer behind the desk. Ashraf Ghani, unable to determine Afghanistan’s future, was describing himself.

The statues’ demolition certainly lived up to the depiction of the Taliban in international media: they were a group of religious fundamentalists who beat women, banned music and measured the lengths of men’s beards to make sure they tallied with the religiously mandated length. This was the government of the day: coherent and imposing its will on the people of Afghanistan, whether they liked it or not.

But who are the Taliban now? Surely this is an important question, particularly if you are trying to work out what to do about Afghanistan; that country for which there were such high hopes after the supposed defeat of the Taliban in 2001, but which is currently disintegrating before our eyes. Yet those responsible for Afghanistan’s future don’t seem to be asking these questions. Which is, of course, one of the reasons that Afghanistan is collapsing. Nobody bothered to find out what the place was like.

Now, after nearly 20 years of hunting terrorists (Al Qaeda), conducting a counterinsurgency (against the Taliban), fighting a drugs war and developing the country, all foreign troops — including 2,500 Americans — are due to leave Afghanistan by the start of May.

This follows the signing of a peace accord between the US and the Taliban in February 2020. The agreement, which astonishingly was negotiated without the participation of the Afghan government, had few stipulations. The US would reduce its troop numbers and would release several thousand prisoners. The Taliban, meanwhile, would agree to peace talks with the Afghan government, and would prevent anyone using Afghan soil to threaten the United States and its allies.

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In reality, this was not a peace agreement, but a fairly obvious smoke screen for a US withdrawal (much like, it has to be said, the Russian withdrawal 30 years earlier). The US had failed to achieve its goals and was leaving.

Since the signing of the accord, the US has broadly followed its side of the bargain, reducing troop numbers and releasing prisoners. The Taliban, however, have not — instead upping its attacks on the Afghan government, while stonewalling any attempts at negotiation.

And so reports from Afghanistan indicate that several provincial centres, including Kandahar, arguably the most important city in Afghanistan after Kabul, are in danger of falling from Afghan government control. Newly elected President Biden is said to be reconsidering whether it is safe for the US to be leaving Afghanistan at all.

All of which sounds like very sensible analysis, and reflects the sort of article you might read in the New York Times. But it is based on a massive assumption: that the Taliban are a coherent organisation with a defined membership, an organisational structure, a guiding framework of ideas and a leadership able to exert control over its fighters.

In turn, these assumptions support the so-called insurgency narrative: that the Afghan government and its international partners have been fighting an insurgency called the Taliban who grow drugs, throw acid in girls’ faces and are generally evil. In this telling, the Afghan government and its international friends are, by definition, good. It is a binary depiction of the war: good versus evil, black versus white, us versus them.

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But what if this dynamic wasn’t actually what was generating most of the violence? For most of the violence in Afghanistan today is driven by hyper-local issues, such as land disputes, access to agricultural water, fights over drugs, generational feuds and abuses of administrative power. Indeed, when the Afghan communist party, heavily supported by the USSR, took power in a coup 43 years ago and precipitated a civil war which has been raging ever since, it unleashed a series of pent-up tensions in the country between conservatives and progressives, the educated and non-educated and, most importantly, between various local interest groups — mostly based on kinship — desperate to control their territories.

This same multifocal civil war continues today, with most of those people fighting the Government doing so for personal or local reasons. Perhaps they have had their land stolen by a warlord. Perhaps they are the victim of predatory behaviour from a local official and need to fight back to maintain their honour. Perhaps they are trying to sell their drugs, or protect their village, or enact a feud. The reasons are endless, but all of them are exacerbated by the fact that Afghanistan has nothing resembling a central government that adjudicates disputes and sets rules that apply to everyone. In fact, the Afghan government is as riven by local factional motivations as the Taliban.

What those on both sides do share, though, is a willingness to accept weapons from anyone — including, but not limited to, the Americans, the Russians, Pakistan and the Taliban — in order to pursue their own personal aims. Importantly, because of the strength of local issues in driving the conflict, the degree to which all these sponsors are able to control the on-the-ground actors is highly questionable.

So, what does this look like in a district in, for example, Kandahar Province? Imagine two villages, A and B. Running between these villages is a water course that both need for their agriculture. Because there hasn’t been a functioning government in Afghanistan for two-thirds of a lifetime — life expectancy is 65 — there is no functioning water management, and these villages are locked in a zero-sum battle over access to water (layered, no doubt, with multiple personal feuds).

Luckily, someone in village A has a relative in the provincial police and manages to have the village militia enrolled in it; they now have access to weapons and the confidence to label village B as “Taliban sympathisers” or some such slur. Village B, in response, decides to send an elder who fought in the mujahideen to the Taliban leadership in Quetta. When the elder says that village A are “westerners”, he is given enough weapons for village B to create their own militia.

Of course, whether village B accepts weapons from the Taliban before or after they are labelled “Taliban sympathisers” is a moot point — the key thing is that everyone is manipulating everyone else in order to access resources that will bolster their cause. That partly explains why commanders and militias change sides all the time, and most actors very sensibly maintain feet in both the government and Taliban camps.

In 2011, I remember meeting a local Taliban commander who had been welcomed into the Afghan government and supplied with motorbikes and weapons to form his own (government-aligned) village defence militia. He had switched back less than a month later: in Afghanistan, survival always trumps ideology. Even the Afghan government sometimes deploys the Taliban and ISIS as spectres to ensure funds and commitments from international partners, such as the US.

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Yet this mythologised Taliban died in 2001, when Pakistani funding all but dried up. So to describe the country’s civil war without reference to its vast array of tribal alliances, as a recent New York Times article does, is to miss the fundamental point. Likewise, while it may be hard to describe exactly what the Taliban are, it is not difficult to describe what they are not; they are not, as this BBC article helpfully describes, a coherent organisation. But it is upon this assumption of Taliban coherence that the plans of the Afghan government, the US and all the other involved countries rest.

And that could have serious repercussions. For assuming that the US continues on their withdrawal (and other countries follow them, because they can’t exist without the massive US logistical footprint in the country), the country is going to fragment, much like it did in the 1990s when the Russians withdrew.

In a mirror of today, it was assumed then that the mujahideen, who fought the Russians throughout the 1980s, would take over the government. But they were utterly divided, more interested in pursuing personal interests, so they ended up fighting each other. History is meant to rhyme, and not repeat, but in Afghanistan, the latter seems highly plausible.

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When I speak to friends in Kabul, they are terrified, and trying to get themselves and as many relatives as possible out of the country. Afghanistan, they say, is about to collapse into tens or hundreds of fiefdoms. Those over 35 or so have memories of the different factions fighting over Kabul in the early nineties — the rocket attacks, the rapes and the brutal pogroms inflicted on the neighbourhoods of opposing ethnicities. Afghanistan’s current leadership, whether government or Taliban, won’t be able to be control it any more than anyone else.

And so we come to the recurring question of the last 20 years: what should the US President do about Afghanistan? Well, President Biden, there are a number of practical decisions to take. If you want to stop Afghanistan splintering into random fiefdoms, you should keep a minimal number of troops in the country and spend enough money necessary to keep the national ring road open (there is only one main road in Afghanistan), and the provincial centres in government hands. Accept that you are there for the long haul, like in Germany or South Korea, and see it as part of your policy towards China, a neighbour with acute interests in Afghanistan and the surrounding countries.

But as you reconsider America’s policy towards Afghanistan, you would do well to remember that, above all else, you will not be able to beat the Taliban, because what you understand as the Taliban simply do not exist.

First, a surreal copy of Baghdad’s Green Zone was built in central Washington to prevent any of them ever taking selfies in Nancy Pelosi’s office ever again. Then a consensus began to develop among America’s elites — a “Domestic War on Terror” must be launched against the Trumpists.

Michel Foucault would have been amused by the situation. In 1976 the Frenchman delivered a lecture, Society Must be Defended, about the relationship between war and the state. What stigmata, he asked, does warfare leave on the national body?

In the case of European colonial powers, Foucault identified a unique type of scar tissue. Colonial practices had a “boomerang effect” on Western states; Europeans experimented with “techniques” of control on the Imperial periphery, which went on to influence “apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power” in the West itself. You must not forget, Foucault told his audience, that one result of colonialism “was that the West could practise something resembling colonisation, or an internal colonialism on itself.”

It was not quite an original thought. Foucault may have been inspired by Hannah Arendt, who, in her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), draws a fairly straight line between Cecil Rhodes’ activities in South Africa and Adolf Hitler’s in Eastern Europe. Arendt was the first to use the phrase “imperial boomerang effect”, whereby authoritarian forms of social control, developed in colonies, are eventually turned on oppressed groups in the homeland. Totalitarianism was the consequence.

Imperialism, Foucault and Arendt thought, whirls back on itself. Given the right pressures, a Green Zone in Baghdad can become a Green Zone in Washington. The War on Terror comes home.

In the days after 9/11, Foucault wasn’t being consulted much by the architects of the new war. “Never again” was the phrase on their minds, not “imperial boomerang effect”. The Bush administration was laying the groundwork for policies like enhanced interrogation, extraordinary rendition, mass digital and telephone surveillance, arrest without warrant — and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Partly from disgust with these policies, Americans elected Barack Obama in 2008 to end them. Here was someone who had read Foucault — in a failed attempt to get a girlfriend — in college, sitting in the Oval Office. In a 2013 speech, Obama warned that force could not be deployed everywhere extremist ideologies took root. Perpetual war would “alter our country in troubling ways.”

As was so often the case, Obama eloquently outlined a problem, and never quite solved it. The War on Terror rippled out into new frontiers — Yemen, Syria, Libya, Niger. He deployed his special forces in at least seventy countries. Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, was killed by a drone strike in 2011. This execution without a trial — even if it was ordered by the former president of the Harvard Law Review — was an extraordinary violation of the Constitution.

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Americans wanted a reduction in the number of terrorists who intended to do them harm. But blanket judgments based on pervasive fear took them somewhere else, and the scope of the anti-terror leviathan is enormous: nearly a million contracted security personnel; at least 33 facilities for these top-secret intelligence workers with the floorspace of three Pentagons; technology that can hack Angela Merkel’s phone and launch four Hellfire missiles at a Yemeni marriage procession from 60,000ft in the air. The US government appears to have given up on building infrastructure for its citizens — but it can spare $1.7 billion for the National Security Agency to build a data storage facility in Utah the size of seventeen football fields. When completed, it will store the virtual equivalent of 500 quintillion pages of text.

Panopticon doesn’t do that justice. The administrators of America’s security state have engineered a hideously overgrown octopus, entangled in everything digital, that can stretch and sniff in all directions, that can ooze into every crack and crevice of society. The NSA knows what porn Muslim radicals watched, and nobody but Edward Snowden and a few difficult journalists really seemed to care.

Perhaps these “apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power” could be justified if they prevented further terrorist attacks on US soil.  As President Bush was so fond of saying throughout his first term: “We are fighting them over there so that we won’t have to fight them here at home.” And at least the hardest edges of it fell on the borderlands of the Empire.

But following 6 January the boomerang is arrowing back to the Imperial centre. The atmosphere at the FBI earlier this month, according to Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of George Washington University’s program on extremism, was like the aftermath of 9/11. Across American media War and Terror analogies flourished.

A former Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo called one Republican congressman who supported the “Stop the Steal” rally more guilty than “95%” of his old detainees. “It’s time we start a domestic war on sedition by American terrorists,” he tweeted. Former FBI director James Comey declared that homegrown terrorists were a bigger threat to America than Islamic extremists. His former deputy, Andrew McCabe, compared those who stormed the Capitol to the Americans who trickled into Syria to join ISIS. Retired Army General Stanley McChrystal had his own analogy. The rampaging Trumpists were an insurgency — just like Al-Qaeda in Iraq. John Brennan, the ex-CIA chief, agreed: this was a homegrown insurgent movement.

Some ideas of how to extirpate it were less bloodthirsty than others. Katie Couric, former co-anchor of NBC’s Today, only wanted to “deprogram” the rioters. Instagram’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez merely wanted to “reign [sic] in our media environment” to combat “disinformation and misinformation”. On ABC’s light entertainment chat show, The View, Meghan McCain admitted that she wasn’t against sending the Trumpists to Gitmo. “They should be treated the same way we treat Al-Qaeda.” Her father — who loved war — would have been proud.

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There was action as well as talk. Trump was muted while he was still President. Parler was removed from the internet entirely. The largest gun forum in the world was taken offline. Corporations ranging from AirBnB to JP Morgan paused or blocked donations to Republicans who queried November’s election result. The Biden administration made passing a law against domestic terrorism a priority on January 7th. Career liberals, progressives and questionable men who gave the approval for “black sites” in Pakistan cheered all this on. The boomerang wasn’t heading towards them. “Techniques of control” — the kind of digital purging that was a feature of the war against ISIS — were flowing back home.

Had Americans forgotten where secrecy had taken Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan? Did they remember the blowback that administration had generated by underwriting a jihad against the USSR, or the generation of radicals (and the flow of migrants to Europe) that were the dividend of Bush’s War on Terror?

No, apparently not. The connection between actions and their consequences is still thinly perceived. “Sweep it all up” Donald Rumsfeld had mused the night the towers fell, “things related and not.”

The MAGA rioters, the QAnon cultists, the whole Trumpian miscellany, was, according to one (unsympathetic) terror academic, “waking up” the actual Deep State, not the one in their conspiratorial nightmares. All those billions and all that hardware may be trained on them. “Terrorism is terrorism” one official familiar with the Biden administration’s security plans told Politico. QAnon will get the Al-Qaeda treatment. The final irony is that those who are being swept up are themselves a legacy of the War on Terror.

Five people died in the Capitol riot. One of them was Ashli Babbit. She’d served fourteen years in the Air Force, and in the livestream she made as she walked towards the Capitol, referred to Trump supporters as “boots on the ground.” She stands for the rest — nearly one in five of those charged after the riot had a military history — far better than the “Q Shaman”. Among the arrested were an Army veteran with sniper training, and a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force. A retired Navy SEAL boasted about storming the Capitol on Facebook. Fluttering above the crowd on January 6th were multiple United States Marine Corps flags.

Other banners — and they are too easily dismissed as kitsch — showed an incarnation of Trump as John Rambo, the character from Sylvester Stallone’s action movie franchise. Rambo is a veteran, broken in Vietnam, who travels to a town to pay his respects to a fallen comrade. He is hounded by the police and unable to find a job. Rambo starts to see the society he fought to defend as corrupt, decadent, and vile. “For me civilian life is nothing! In the field we had a code of honour… Back here there’s nothing!”

The veterans of small, pointless wars are vulnerable to feelings of betrayal. Trump knew how to speak to them. “We’ve destabilised the Middle East,” he said in South Carolina in 2016, “they lied.” Or as he put it in a later rally: “We’re all victims. Everybody here… They’re all victims.” It is not difficult to imagine how groups of unsettled veterans, estranged from their society, hardened with the knowledge that scandalous abuses are commonplace, could come to believe that their government stole an election from them.

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The historian Katherine Belew, author of Bring The War Home, a study of the growth in White Power movements after the Vietnam war, told an interviewer that the Capitol riot was a “ricochet of warfare.” There is a resonance too with the 20th century, when numerous European revolutions were stimulated by the return of unhappy soldiers to disintegrating polities.

What will happen if MAGAstan is treated like Afghanistan? Both the development of a networked armed anti-government underground, and the methods legislators, former spooks and talking heads want to use to destroy it, are boomeranging consequences of the War on Terror. Two decades and unlimited means did not end Islamic terror, which flourishes from French suburbs to Nigeria’s border with Cameroon.

Going after Trumpists with no-fly lists and secret prisons, dressed up in vague and open-ended rhetoric, will not be an effective treatment. It’s trepanning a skull to lift the “stone of madness” from the patient’s head. If there was an effective salve for political extremism, it would have been found a long time ago. Above everything, there is a wider sense that in America history is returning, and means to collect its debts.

France has now been waging war in the no man’s land of the Sahel for six long years. Barkhane began on 1 August 2014, with a mandate for counter-insurgency ops across Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger — an area the size of Europe. But in the Sahel, the terrorists can run and they can hide. Initially, the French deployment was 4,500 troops — with the Legion heavily committed, as always — but this year President Macron boosted the troop numbers of President Hollande to 5,100. Political Left to political Right, Barkhane is a French commitment. For now.

Ostensibly, the French work alongside the Sahel’s national armies and the peacekeepers of the United Nations’ Minumusa stabilization mission in Mali. For months Paris has been trying to build support in Europe and the West for a multinational special ops “Task Force Takuba”. Only Estonia and the Czech Republic have confirmed allocation of personnel; Britain, meanwhile, contributes a paltry three Chinook helicopters to Barkhane; Denmark two Merlin helicopters; the US declines the invitation to the party, again and again.

Barkhane is France’s show. No one else has the stomach for counter-terrorism in the dust and heat and the vastness of the Sahel, not after Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The other countries of the West barely report the operation, let alone support it. Barkhane is France’s lonely war.

The financial cost to La Belle France of Barkhane is a breath-sucking 600 million euros per annum. After all, soldiers need to be fed, equipped, and supported by Mirage 2000 jets, Tigre attack helicopters, Reaper drones, and conveyed by 380 trucks and 500 armoured vehicles. The cruel desert is endless.

So is Operation Barkhane, which has become France’s never-ending war.

The insurgency in the Sahel began in Mali in 2012, when a Tuareg separatist uprising was exploited by al-Qaeda-linked extremists who seized cities in the north. With Mali tottering on the brink of collapse France, the former colonial power, began its military intervention, driving the jihadists from the urban centres. This success turned to catastrophe, however, because the militants morphed into mobile formations operating in rural areas, where they proved as easy to kill as the wind. The insurgency spread to central and southern regions of Mali and then into Burkina Faso and Niger.

The  jihadists in the Sahel come in 57 varieties, but the majority of their attacks are attributed to Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimeen  (JNIM), which formed in March 2017 and has sworn  allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Since May 2019,  rival Isis has  given its imprimatur in the Sahel area to Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), a split from Boko Haram.

Whether umbilically linked to Isis or Al-Qaeda, the jihadists make the sands run with blood.  More than 4,000 people were reported killed in jihadist attacks in the Sahel in 2019, and tns of thousands were displaced. The violence vortexes, year on year; recently the U.N, and Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the Sahel insurgency now threatens the countries of West Africa.  The central states of Mali are in anarchy.

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There is no ambiguity about Operation Barkhane. Paris does not dress it up as “peace-keeping” or “stabilisation”; French officials insist that Barkhane’s priority is counterterrorism and does not baulk at the targeted killing of key jihadist leaders. So far, two of the five founding leaders of  JNIM have been “neutralised” (but read “assassinated”). In order to pursue these aims, the French have negotiated a perhaps unprecedented military rite of passage whereby their forces can conduct offensive operations in other sovereign nations. Under this deal UN Security Council resolutions authorise French troops to “use all necessary means.”

According to the press communiques of the Ministère des Armées, there are tactical victories over the jihadists almost every month. Certainly, the pace of operations in the tri-border zone of Mali-Burkina Faso-Niger has increased since Macron doubled down on troop commitment. In January this year, French troops were killing a militant a day in the Liptako-Gourma area of the tri-border; since Barkhane began around 700 jihadists have been captured or killed.

Sometimes, though, the blood flows the wrong way. French operations in the Sahel have led to the death of 43 French military personnel, most recently Tojohasina Razafintsalama of the 1 RHP (1^st Regiment de Hussards Parachustistes), killed in Mali on 23 July. Two other “red berets” were wounded in the same suicide attack by a jihadist driving a truck load of explosives. In the obligatory communiqué from the Elysee, President Macron said he “bows with deep respect to the sacrifice of this soldier, who died in the accomplishment of his mission in the service of France”.

And so half-way down the world the French are fighting the War on Terror that the rest of the West has retreated from. There is a terrible innocence to Barkhane. The French commander of Barkhane, General Pascal Facon has declared he can “easily” defeat the Islamists. “We shouldn’t underestimate them,” he said, but “we shouldn’t give them too much importance either.”

This is agonisingly naïve. Seven hundred jihadists may have been taken out of play, but that still leaves about 6,000 terrorists in the Sahel, and they know the lie of the bad lands. The combat patrols of the French rarely do. They drive hundreds of miles from their “temporary advance bases” deep in the desert, bouncing up and down in steel armoured cars and personnel carriers, in temperatures topping 40 degrees, seeing nothing but sand and acacia trees through their wrap-around sunglasses.

For hour after hour. There is looking for a needle in a haystack; then there is looking for jihadists in thousands of square miles of the Sub-Saharan Sahel. The red dust kicked up by the convoys can be seen for miles. The jihadists get prior warning, and melt away with  their AK-47s. Just recently, a French combat engineer was interviewed on television following  a search for a jihadist weapons cache, ending with the inevitable reply “the search didn’t find anything today”. It has become the mantra of  French officers interviewed about Barkhane — “We didn’t find anything”. They smile for the camera, but you can sense the frustration.

The jihadists find the patrols, however. The threat of ambush, in the desert and in the villages, is ever present. The jihadists may wear flip-flops but they mount viciously effective military operations, taking out the armoured personnel carriers with rockets; in January they attacked a static army base at Chinagodrar in western Niger, killing 89 soldiers and staff.

The Islamists can afford to spend lives and they can afford to spend money, being more than amply funded by crime. According to the Institute for Security Studies, these activities “mainly take the form of trafficking in weapons, drugs, motorcycles and fuel, along with cattle rustling, artisanal gold mining and poaching”.

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Will rural France recover from Covid?

By John Lewis-Stempel

Neither should it be supposed that the militants lack popular support. The national governments of the “Group of Five for the Sahel” — Chad, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger — are blighted by corruption and incompetence, and some in the villages think “Better the Islamist devil you don’t know very well than the governmental one you definitely do.” Unsurprisingly, the Islamists also frame Operation Barkhane as Imperialism Redux, so that the French are in danger of handing the Islamists the most dangerous weapon of all, the propaganda narrative of A War of Independence.

In terms of military evolution, France is where America was in 2001 with Afghanistan. No exit strategy, no plan other than fighting war with war. Meanwhile, the armies of the “G5 Sahel”’, supposedly supportive of Barkhane, are under-trained and under-equipped. On one training exercise, the French instructor discovered that his Malian army students had no idea what a compass was.

Barkhane, and its lack of effectiveness in bringing resolution, is starting to take its toll. Anti-French demonstrations in Bamako, the Malian capital, were regular fixtures before Covid, with Macron depicted as Hitler on placards.

Still, there is something distinctly, forlornly heroic about the operation. The French have a dislike of Islamism that is visceral, reflexive. The French are also psychologically comfortable in playing soldier in the Sahel. Last year in a bar in Saint-Maixent, where the French army has its NCO training base, I asked a corporal what was the purpose of Barkhane? He replied with a one-word answer “Bataclan.” His mate nodded over his glass of 1664 lager.

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The world’s next jihadi flashpoint

By Will Brown

The theory is that, by fighting the jihadists in the Sahel-Saharan strip (“SSS” in military jargon), they will be unable to mount terror attacks in France like that of 13 November, 2015. Maybe, but only a fool would discount from France’s war ambitions the stopping of the flow of migrants to Europe caused by Malian instability, and protection of French uranium sources in the region. The French have admirably lofty philosophies, but they understand realpolitik.

Only a fool, too, would disavow the imperial murmurs that still occur in the heart of France. Macron may come over all Monsieur Union européenne, but France has an unrequited longing for its colonial past. You only have to watch the weather report on France 2  TV to see that; after giving the meteo for The Hexagon it proceeds to give the forecast for “France d’outre-mer”, the lingering imperial outposts, as far away as New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Or indeed, watch the annual Bastille Day display of military might parading down the Champs-Elysées.

In the vastness of the Sahel France gets to play out colonial memories as neo- imperial dreams. But this is the tragedy of Barkhane, that France most ambitious military effort since Algeria is turning into a nightmare, her own personal Afghanistan.

We conducted it in a chivalrous fashion. And We Won It. Knighted historians have denounced me for saying so, but the common idea of that war in modern Britain is a vague belief that we went to war in 1939 to save the Jews of Europe.

Of course no historian says this. Nobody who knows anything at all about the war could possibly believe it. As it happens, we did not in fact save most of the Jews of Europe, or make any great efforts to do so once we knew they were being murdered. But then, most people don’t really know anything about the war.

Where was Narvik? Did we really attack the French fleet? Why did Danzig matter? What are the Ardennes? What happened at Tobruk? How on earth was HMS Hood sunk so easily? Why did the USA take so long to enter the war? Why weren’t we invaded in fact, as we have been so many times in fiction?

How come we ended up in alliance with the monster, Stalin, if our cause was freedom and civilisation? Why did we send all our gold to America? Did we get it back?

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The Scopes Monkey Trial was about racism, not god

By Dennis Sewell

The whole story is a bafflement of obscurity and confusion. Most of us just know the legend, which more or less requires us not to think, or study the matter. Let’s just have another book about codebreaking geniuses at Bletchley Park or brave Special Operations Executive agents parachuted into occupied France.

Or perhaps another film about the Dunkirk evacuation, which entirely glosses over why our army, bereft of equipment worth billions, was standing up to its armpits in salt water on the French coast. And the newspapers print the legend. And the publishers print the legend. And TV shows the legend.

TV’s latest excursion into this Churchilliad is a drama called World on Fire. It features a number of plucky and intrepid characters, several of them quite Left-wing — for this is after all an anti-Nazi war, which was therefore surely Left-wing. But here come the contradictions again, which I doubt the BBC will bother with very much: it was not so Left-wing at the start, if you happened to be a Communist, hamstrung by Stalin’s 1939-41 alliance with Hitler.

And much of it is set in Poland, at that time a military dictatorship which had recently taken part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and where anti-Semitism was common, even if not officially encouraged. We are invited to sympathise with one character’s fury at Britain’s inaction as the Nazis prepare to invade. Yet most British people at the time were baffled by our alliance with Poland, and Britain never had any intention of doing anything serious about it, lacking the offensive forces needed to do so.

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The squalid myth of Dickensian London

By Robert Tombs

The historical vagueness and confusion in the scenes which follow is astonishing. I doubt whether one in a hundred of those watching could find Danzig on a map, or know why its Polish Post Office was so important in 1939 (A clue. Danzig at that date was so overwhelmingly German by population — 98% — that the Polish Post Office was one of the very few pieces of Polish real estate in the city).

I personally was puzzled to see, in late August 1939, young Polish men shown apparently volunteering to join their country’s army in its hour of need, as they would already have been under arms. Poland, which though poor and poorly-equipped and not as big a military power as it liked to think, was not unwarlike, and had maintained a two-year compulsory military service requirement since the 1920s.

This misty lack of clarity about checkable facts is, in my view, a direct result of the wilful ignorance we have imposed on ourselves, rather than make an honest examination of the origins and aims of that war. Asked why we signed a treaty with Poland, I doubt one British person in 100 could tell you. Asked what British troops were even doing in North Africa, where there was so much fighting, they cannot really explain.

You will hear stuff about the need to defend the Suez Canal, in fact rendered almost useless throughout the war by our inability to control the Mediterranean. Or there will be the need to defend “the oilfields”, by which is meant those in Iraq, a vast distance from North Africa.

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Magna Carta proves the English aren't exceptional

By Polly MacKenzie

In fact, how is it that a war which began very much in the heart of Europe so quickly spun into lots of small pieces on the far side of the world? Why, for four years of a six year war, from Dunkirk to D-Day, were British soldiers not in direct contact with the main body of the main enemy, Germany?

Why, if the peril of invasion was so great in 1940, did that invasion never happen? Would you be surprised to know that in 1940 Germany did not possess, or build, a single landing craft? Or that its naval chiefs were strongly against any attempt to mount such an invasion, which was never seriously prepared?

We rightly condemn the horrors of the Blitz, especially on poor Coventry. How come almost nobody has heard of any German city bombed, in a morally dubious way, by the Allies — except Dresden in February 1945, which even the most bellicose person accepts may have been going a bit far? In fact from 1943 to 1945, we deliberately bombed working-class German civilians in their homes in dozens of German cities, killing hundreds of thousands.

As for our endorsement, at Potsdam, of a colossal and extremely violent ethnic cleansing of central Europe after the war, it is perhaps the least known major event in human history. To know of these things is to be unable, any more, to listen to the legend in the same way.

Yes, it was good that we won and they lost. Yes, our enemy represents an appalling unequalled evil. No bad deed done by us could possibly obscure or cancel the evils of the Third Reich, or be equated with them. But the unique evil of the Nazis does not wholly blot out lesser evils on our side.

This bleak realisation has been a loss for me, for as a child I loved the legend, and kept a place for it in my heart well into adulthood. It was only when it was repeatedly used as a sort of exemplar for modern wars of choice that I began to wonder about it.

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Anne Boleyn: whore, witch or Cinderella?

By Suzannah Lipscomb

In the end I grew tired of being told that every crisis was a new Munich and every petty foreign despot was a new Hitler, from Manuel Noriega to Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. I grew even more tired of being told that people such as Anthony Blair and George W. Bush were the inheritors of Winston Churchill.

And I grew sick of being told that, as an opponent or critic of voluntary war, I was the modern version of Neville Chamberlain — or worse. And because I was dismayed by the use to which the legend was being put, I eventually examined the legend and found it wanting.

But we are on the dangerous edge of things here. If you mention doubts about the World War Two myth, you are quite likely to be falsely accused of several severe misdeeds. You will immediately be told that you are a defeatist who thinks we should have made peace with Berlin in 1940. I am no such thing, and have never written a syllable to suggest that I am. Yet I find that people just assume it to be so, of anyone who departs from the cult of unmixed heroism and virtue. As it happens, I think Churchill’s greatest action was to refuse to talk to Hitler in 1940, and I believe that a peace with the Third Reich would have been a crime and a mistake.

I am filled with admiration for those who fought and took appalling risks to fight the war. I should be, as my father was one of them, spending long months on the “Worst Journey in the World”, the Russian convoys between Scapa Flow and Murmansk. Knowing what I know about that theatre of war (my father seldom spoke about it, but suggested some reading so that I could learn from others), I doubt whether most present-day British people (including me) would even have been prepared to set out, let alone endure what happened on the way.

Though my father died more than 30 years ago, I recently devoted some months to obtaining the British medal which was eventually issued to those who took part in this very severe theatre of war. It arrived, at length, in a cheap plastic case, very inferior to those in which modern civilian honours are presented. This seemed in a way to symbolise the contrast between the grandeur of what we believe and the pinched, stretched and weary truth about what actually happened.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday and author of The Phoney Victory: Britain’s World War Two Illusion (Tauris)

Wolf’s fate has been recorded across the broadsheet media. It all started to unravel for her in the worst way possible – in a live on-air radio interview. In May she appeared with the author and BBC radio host Matthew Sweet, and during that polite exchange Sweet pointed out that there was a major error in the book of Wolf’s which they were discussing.

Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love was based on a PhD thesis that Wolf had written in 2015 and largely centred on the poet John Addington Symonds. It was Wolf’s contention that the gay poet had the risk of execution hanging over his head in Victorian England. To prove this Wolf claimed that she had identified “dozens and dozens” of gay men of the era who had been executed — a punishment which was believed to have ceased for the crime of sodomy many years before.

In their discussion Sweet pointed out that Wolf had made a major if understandable error. The men in whose cases the words “death recorded” was listed were not in fact executed (as Wolf had assumed) but were trials in which the judge had actually abstained from pronouncing a death sentence.

What is more, Wolf appeared to think that charges of “sodomy” related to the modern understanding of the term whereas in the era about which she was writing the term referred also to child abuse. Meaning that one of the cases the author highlighted was not in fact (as she said) that of a 14-year-old executed in 1859 for the crime of sodomy, but a man convicted (and not executed) for performing an indecent act on a six-year-old.

Needless to say, this is the stuff of authorial nightmares. And doubtless there will be some accounting at Wolf’s publishers over how such elementary mistakes were able to slip by unquestioned.

By the same author

Woke GQ reeks of fear

By Douglas Murray

The problem, though, is that Wolf’s error is not a one-off, but part of a pattern of shoddy research in a career spanning nearly three decades. Her first book, The Beauty Myth (1991) was marred by a number of problems. One was the undeniable having-it-both-ways by which Wolf simultaneously lamented the imposition of certain societal norms of attractiveness while not exactly presenting her worst side, nor failing to benefit from that happy chance.

The more serious problem with the book, however, was the shoddy research for which she immediately became known. Wolf infamously claimed that 150,000 women were dying from anorexia-related eating disorders each year in America. As the writer Christina Hoff Sommers subsequently showed (in her 1995 book Who Stole Feminism?), the actual figure had been exaggerated several hundred times over by Wolf, and the actual figure was between 100 and 400.

The strand of slackness soon merged, as it so often does, with the paranoid style. In 2007 she was one of those American writers who honestly seemed to believe that George W Bush was, in his last days in office, not looking forward to retirement and a quieter life but was in fact preparing to govern forever.  In a book titled The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot Wolf suggested that the then President and his team were enacting the playbook that dictators had used throughout the twentieth century.

By the same author

Will maths succumb to the woke wave?

By Douglas Murray

Among Wolf’s claims were that the Bush administration was in the process of coercing not only the media but also American academia to their dastardly plans. As anybody with even the slightest knowledge of either institution would know, if the Bush administration ever had sought to coerce the entirety of the US media and Academy then it was — against some competition — the least successful effort of that administration.

In her book, as well as a long piece in The Guardian summing up that book’s arguments, Wolf made nods to reality, but then hid them as fast as she could. For instance we read: “It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat….” Etc etc. But soon even that “of course-ery” became lost. Even though George Bush miraculously stood down and allowed Barack Obama to enter the Oval Office, Wolf’s warnings of an imminent fascist coup in America continued unabated.

By this stage Wolf had tumbled the whole way down the Gore Vidal trail along which so many bright American men and women go as they start to believe that they are living in a proto-fascist state; one that is especially intent on misleading and suppressing figures like themselves at the vanguard of the resistance. As Wolf publicly stumbled along this well-trodden path she even began to engage in that “I’m only asking questions” form of conspiracy theory that vague and lazy people have such a habit of falling into.

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

In 2012 Wolf threw herself feet first into the Occupy Wall Street Movement, apparently in the hope that here was the way to stop the imminent coup. But the fact that Occupy fell apart was simply more evidence of the fascist nature of the American state. In The Guardian (yet again) she maintained that the US government were conspiring with the American banks to impose a “totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent”.

It got uglier. By 2014 she began suggesting that the carefully packaged beheading videos which the terrorist group ISIS was then releasing on a weekly basis were not what they seemed; indeed Wolf began declaring that these videos were in fact “staged” by the American government.

So far down this Alex Jones-ian path did Wolf go that she even went on shamefully to suggest that both the victims of these terrible acts and their families were in fact actors. In the inevitable criticism elicited by her inhumane comments Wolf fell back on the old conspiracist claim that she was “only asking questions”, because isn’t this what journalists are meant to do and so on.

Perhaps Wolf took the time off to do her PhD at Oxford in the middle of this decade because it had all got a bit too much for her; after all, one must suppose that warning about a fascism that never emerges would take a toll on anyone. And so Wolf went back to university and back to basics. The problem – as the pulping of her latest book shows – is that the basics of Wolf’s work are sloppy and error-ridden while the developed work is not so good, relying merely on paranoia and delusion.

Perhaps at some point the two styles will merge and we will be able to read of how the Bush and Obama administrations deliberately smuggled errors into the archives on John Addington Symonds in order to sabotage their valiant critic. I for one shall look forward to the next book.