In an interview on Global Security

The Jason Burke book on al Qaeda.

He’s a great writer and his other book, On The Road to Kandahar, is really good too. He was one of the only journalists who, right from the beginning, were saying: hang on a minute. It’s not that simple. What he does in this book is explain the history and significance of al Qaeda and the motives of those attracted to its violent ideology. Again, he was one of the earliest people doing this and it’s a very deep analysis and understanding drawn from an interaction with the people. That comes across in the book very, very well.

These kinds of books worry me. I always think they’re going to glamorise al Qaeda and the author somehow. ‘I went into a cave with my turban on,’ kind of thing. The machismo.

I think to try to understand it is not necessarily to condone it. In order to defeat something you have to understand it. He doesn’t do the machismo thing – this is an analysis based on personal experience and there are personal anecdotes in the book but it’s restrained and presciently written. He argues that al Qaeda isn’t a structured terrorist organisation. It’s a core of bin Laden and his closest supporters, then the wider network and then the ideology of it, of freeing Muslim lands and cleansing a corrupt world through violence. The last is the key thing he explores, and he presents bin Laden, in part, as this important countercultural symbol like a Che Guevara for the Middle East, representing the discourse of dissent for some young Muslims. This is how he is viewed by some people. The other thing he does is he explores the West’s misunderstanding of Islamic militancy and the fact that it is very diverse with lots of different local manifestations. The focus of America on al Qaeda is a distraction from examining why people are attracted to this kind of ideology.