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By Root 958 0

which passes through, was cancelled. The regime in Yemen has also reversed its earlier co-operation in the war on terror, by releasing jihadist prisoners, including those responsible for killing seventeen US sailors on the USS Cole, who have gone on to attack US interests and foreign adventure tourists, just as some of the released Guantánamo detainees have become suicide bombers.28 Since the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in December 2006 to depose the Islamic Courts regime, conditions there have gone from bad to worse, with 1.5 million refugees and another 1.5 million dependent on UN food aid. The Ethiopian presence also enables the jihadists to masquerade as defenders of Somali nationalism and sovereignty, a pose adopted by some of the coastal pirates—fishermen who claim, in the absence of central government, that they are warding off Spanish trawlers infringing a notional 200-mile fishing limit. Somalia and Yemen should therefore be regarded as areas where Al Qaeda may set up a future territorial base should the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands prove inhospitable.

While the picture in these countries is dispiriting, elsewhere there are signs of hope. There has been a marked lull in jihadist activity in South Asia, where, as in Indonesia and Malaysia, aggressive counter-terrorism tactics by special forces has been accompanied by softer programmes designed to disengage the minds of imprisoned extremists. Perhaps the head of Indonesia’s counter-terrorism police was taking things too far when he invited some of the imprisoned Bali bombings conspirators to a party in his home in September 2007. ‘We make them our brothers, not our enemy,’ explained General Surya Dharma. There has been no major jihadist terrorist incident in Indonesia since 2005—surely a consequence of more than two hundred arrests. In Turkey, two roundups in January and April 2008 netted some fifty Al Qaeda extremists, while revealing the parallel world they had established, including a school system that even issued regular report cards.29

One issue has clearly exacerbated jihadist terrorism: Iraq. Because this has also telescoped the already short-term memories of so many commentators (for according to professor Akbar Ahmed one can find jihadists under Nor Mohammed seeking to take over Waziristan in the mid-1970s) I decided to give it marginal attention in the book. In case anyone has forgotten, Algerian Islamists attempted to crash a passenger aircraft into the Eiffel Tower in the mid-1990s.30 Whether the US should have invaded or occupied Iraq is not a subject that belongs in a history of terrorism, and nor does the question of whether Iraq will ultimately remain a unitary state, which can be left to futurologists. It may break up; it may become a Middle Eastern version of post-war Finland. I also instinctively recoil from those who so eagerly believe that the US administration acted in bad faith, that it is a captive of Israel—or an American-Jewish lobby—or that it has established a regime of terror akin to the gulag or Nazi Germany. Much of this is not even worthy of comment. As a conservative realist, sceptical of the zealous neo-cons, I hold no brief for former assistant defense secretary Douglas Feith, but to compare him with the Nazis is tastelessly wrong—and not only because nine members of his family perished in the Holocaust.31

After four years of floundering around in Iraq, effective counter-insurgency strategies seem to have been adopted by the US. In part this reflects mistakes made by their opponents. Al Qaeda’s leadership lost control over one major franchisee, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who discredited the brand through his penchant for videoing the beheadings of hostages. Even Ayman al-Zawahari was moved to protest at the time. Commencing in 2006, a US-inspired Sunni Awakening movement has thrown off the regime of terror which mainly foreign jihadists erected in some central provinces, reasserting the rule of conservative tribal elders into the bargain. To overcome their own distaste for relying on former insurgent opponents to crush