17 9/11 and the age of terror
Introduction: the return of a master narrative
What was missing from the 1990s was the serious engagement of a great power,
especially the American superpower, with a major enemy. So superior was the United
States to all other states on the standard indices of strategic power that the potential
appearance of a ‘peer competitor’ was not anticipated officially for fifteen to twenty-five
years. But on 11 September 2001 a worthy foe made its existence and intentions crystal
clear, even though it bore no relation to standard notions of a ‘peer competitor’. With
al Qaeda in the field as a self-declared enemy of the United States – in fact, an enemy of
all ‘Zionists and Crusaders’, as Osama bin Laden’s fatwas labelled al Qaeda’s enemies –
strategic history was back up and running with a master narrative. Violent Islamic
fundamentalism would define the political and strategic contexts of the early twenty-first
century. At least it would do so for the United States, for South Asia and for Europe,
though to a lesser degree in the last case. Just how long this new ‘age of terror’ would
last was a distinctly open question. It related intimately to the issue of whether future
warfare would primarily be irregular. In common with death and taxes, terrorism will
always be with us, just as it always has been. The strategic issue is how important will be
its residual presence?
9/11: World War III?
After a decade wandering in the strategic wilderness, bereft of a dominant threat of
sufficient potency to concentrate American minds, 9/11 returned the US superpower to
the mainstream of strategic history, and did so explosively, one might add. America
proclaimed that it was ‘a nation at war’, and those words from 2005 were amended a year
later in the Quadrennial Defense Review Report: ‘The United States is a nation engaged
in what will be a long war’ (Rumsfeld, 2006: v). At last, the Soviet threat, which had
provided coherence to US policy and strategy, as well as to much of world politics for