A Journey (61 page)

Over time, I began to think there was never a moment when I could be completely candid and exposed. You worried that even sitting in your living room or in the bath, someone would come to photograph, question and call upon you to justify yourself. I became unhealthily focused on how others saw me, until, again over time, I refocused on how I saw myself. I realised I was public property, but the freehold was with myself. I learned not to let the opinion of others, even a prevailing one, define my view of myself and what I should or should not do.

The TUC took place in early to mid-September, and the party conference a couple of weeks later. Both always made September a little nerve-tingling. From the TUC you could get a sense of where the party were liable to be in terms of contentment and/or otherwise. Trouble at the first usually presaged trouble at the second. The 2001 TUC was no exception. Having just won our first ever consecutive full term, in a second landslide victory, you would have thought it an occasion for general rejoicing. ‘I think mostly they’ll want to congratulate you on the victory,’ Alastair said to me, po-faced, as we boarded the train.

‘Do you think so?’ I said, perking up.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he replied.

Sure enough, the mood as I arrived at lunchtime was the usual mixture of sweet and sour, but with the sweet a decided minority. I went straight to the Grand Hotel. We had an hour and a half before I had to go to the new Conference Centre a hundred yards or so along the beachfront. I worked in the bedroom as the team gathered in the living room of the suite. Just after a quarter to two, around 8.45 Eastern Standard Time, Alastair was called out of the room by Godric Smith, his very capable deputy. Alastair came back in, turned on the television and said, ‘You’d better see this.’ He knew I hated being interrupted just before a speech, so I realised I’d better look. The TV was showing pictures of the Trade Center like someone had punched a huge hole in it, fire and smoke belching forth. Just over fifteen minutes later, a second plane hit, this time graphically captured live on-screen. This was not an accident. It was an attack.

At that moment, I felt eerily calm despite being naturally horrified at the devastation, and aware this was not an ordinary event but a world-changing one. At one level it was a shock, a seemingly senseless act of evil. At another level, it made sense of developments I had seen growing in the world these past years – isolated acts of terrorism, disputes marked by the same elements of extremism, and a growing strain of religious ideology that was always threatening to erupt, and now had.

Within a very short space of time, it was clear the casualties would be measured in thousands. I ordered my thoughts. It was the worst terrorist attack in human history. It was not America alone who was the target, but all of us who shared the same values. We had to stand together. We had to understand the scale of the challenge and rise to meet it. We could not give up until it was done. Unchecked and unchallenged, this could threaten our way of life to its fundamentals. There was no other course; no other option; no alternative path. It was war. It had to be fought and won. But it was a war unlike any other. This was not a battle for territory, not a battle between states; it was a battle for and about the ideas and values that would shape the twenty-first century.

All this came to me in those forty minutes between the first attack and my standing up in front of the audience to tell them that I would not deliver my speech but instead return immediately to London. And it came with total clarity. Essentially, it stayed with that clarity and stays still, in the same way, as clear now as it was then.

Immediately I saw that, though it was a war, because of its nature it would have to be described and fought differently. It was, in a profound sense, a battle that was ideological, the mores and modus vivendi of religious fanaticism versus those of an enlightened, secular system of government that in the West, at least, incorporated belief in liberty, equality and democracy. It was also a battle about modernisation, a clash not so much between civilisations, but rather one about the force and consequence of globalisation.

All around the globe, the new technology – the Internet, computers, mobile phones, mass travel and communication – was opening the world up, casting people together, mixing cultures, races, faiths in a vast melting pot of human interaction. With this, came the reaction. In the West, it often took the form of virulent nationalism, waves of anti-immigrant feeling as people saw their traditional identity being weakened and their control over the world around them being surrendered, economically and culturally.

Within Islam, other, deeper forces were at work. Many distrusted globalisation, worried about the way it changed society, worried about ceding authority to it. Many disliked Western culture, its brash insistence on liberal attitudes, its sexual freedom, its individualism that could and sometimes did lapse into hedonism. All of this would have produced its own reaction. But what deepened it and turned it into a powerful radicalising potency was peculiar to Islam. For centuries, Islam had not only been a dominant religious movement in the Middle East and beyond, but had also achieved political dominance and led the world in science, art and culture.

For hundreds of years after the death of Christ, as Christianity was spread first by those scorned and persecuted by the Roman Empire and then as the official religion of the Empire, it became the accepted or enforced religion of countries that today we know as Muslim: Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq. There are still pockets of Christians in each today, though less than there were; and they descend from Christian communities that pre-date Islam.

By the seventh century, Christianity was riven by division, schisms and battles over what was heresy and what wasn’t. Once martyred and persecuted, the Christians then hounded not only those who weren’t Christian, but also those Christians who disagreed with the orthodoxy. For a religion based on compassion and love, it was a dismal picture.

When Islam began, and within the space of twenty or so years was established by the Prophet Muhammad into the government of what we now know as Saudi Arabia and beyond, it was in part an attempt to take the Abrahamic faiths back to their roots and develop them into a principled, rational and moral way forward for the world. The message of the Prophet was given to him by the angel Gabriel from God – the Koran therefore being the direct recital of the word of God.

At least to begin with, Islam was a welcome contrast with the state of Christianity. Where Christian armies would routinely butcher their foes, Islam showed mercy. Where other religions were forcibly suppressed, Islam showed tolerance. Where priests and prelates often lived lives of debauchery and vice, the followers of Islam seemed genuine disciples of devotion and discipline to God.

As Islam expanded far beyond Mecca and Medina, it was often looked upon as a liberator, even by some of the Christian communities such as the Nestorians in Iraq. In time, of course, as it became more powerful it also became more dictatorial. Non-believers were offered a choice – conversion or taxation – and the price of the latter became uncomfortably high. Nonetheless, there is a fair case for saying that up to and through the Crusades, and until around the European Renaissance, Islam was the greater repository of civilised thought.

The history of Islam – its origins, its rise, its present predicament – is essential to understanding the significance of the events of September 11. It is precisely here that I made a mistake: I misunderstood the depth of the challenge. I was ignorant of the pervasive nature of the phenomenon. As at September 11 2001, I accepted what most accepted: this act was perpetrated by a small group of fanatics wholly unrepresentative of Islam who could and should be crushed.

If I had known then that a decade later we would still be fighting in Afghanistan, I would have been profoundly perturbed and alarmed.

I hope I would have still taken the same decision, both there and in respect of Iraq. To have tried to escape the confrontation would have been a terrible error, an act of political cowardice. What I know now does not make me any less committed to the fight we began on the day of the event itself. On the contrary, it is even more clear to me that the battle has to be fought with every means at our disposal, and fought until it is won.

What is clear now is the scale of the challenge, which in two senses is different to what we originally contemplated. The first is that in the mindset that is modern Islam, there is one spectrum, not several. At the furthest end of the spectrum are the extremists who advocate terrorism to further their goal of an Islamic state, a rebirth of the caliphate that came into being in the years following the death of the Prophet. It is true they are few in number, but their sympathisers reach far further along the spectrum than we think. While many do not agree with the terrorism, they ‘understand’ why it is happening.

Still further along the spectrum are those who condemn the terrorists, but in a curious and dangerous way buy into bits of their world view. They agree with the extremists that the US is anti-Islam; they see the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq as invasions of Muslim nations because they were Muslim nations. They see Israel as the symbol of Western anti-Islamic prejudice. This group stretches uncomfortably far into the middle of the spectrum.

Then you have, of course, a large number, probably the majority, who condemn the terrorists and their world view.

But – and here is the second point – even this group have not yet confidently found their way to articulating a thoroughly reformed and modernising view of Islam. In other words, it is true they find the terrorism repugnant and they wish to be in alliance with the Western nations against it, but this does not yet translate into an alternative narrative for Islam that makes sense of its history and provides a coherent vision for its future. What this means is that very often countries in the Arab and Muslim world will offer their people a disconcerting and ultimately self-defeating choice between a ruling elite with the right idea, but which they are reluctant or fearful to advertise, and a popular movement with the wrong one, which they are all too keen to proclaim.

The combination of all of this means that this battle is not, I’m afraid, one between a small, unrepresentative group of extremists and the rest of us. Or at least, it is not only that. It is also a fundamental struggle for the mind, heart and soul of Islam.

In that struggle we are necessary participants, both because we came under attack and also because those who must lead Islam to change need our support. In the final analysis, of course, it is a struggle that must be won from within. Such struggles don’t last an electoral cycle; they last a generation.

Back in the instant following the cataclysmic act of terrorism that stunned, shocked and appalled the world, the issue was clear: the madmen had declared war. They would be rooted out and eliminated. No one doubted it. No one – or very few – disputed it, or the action that followed.

Be under no illusion whatever – and the period since then is littered with illusions – there were only two ways of dealing with this phenomenon. One was to manage it; to have left the Taliban in power but ringed them with sanctions and alliances; to have adopted a purely soft-power approach to the challenge. Some indeed advocated this strategy (though not many did so on 12 September), and I do not dismiss it. It is the true alternative to what we actually did. The idea would have been to have worked for gradual reform and the appearance of a new Islam over time. So we would have been provoked to war; and resisted the provocation.

The other way, the way we chose, was to confront it militarily. I still believe that was the right choice, but the costs, implications and consequences were far greater than any of us, and certainly me, could have grasped on that day.

To win in this way would not and does not require simply a military strategy to defeat an enemy that is fighting us. It requires a whole new geopolitical framework. It requires nation-building. It requires a myriad of interventions deep into the affairs of other nations. It requires above all a willingness to see the battle as existential and to see it through, to take the time, to spend the treasure, to shed the blood, believing that not to do so is only to postpone the day of reckoning, when the expenditure of time, treasure and blood will be so much greater. Who knows which is right? No one. We will only know later. Just as our knowledge was limited on September 11 2001, so our knowledge remains limited now. In such circumstances, in such conditions of understanding, the only course is to follow instinct and belief. There is nothing more to do. That is what I did in those days following the tragedy.

All these years on and still fighting, people look at the situation and ask: What went wrong? This ignores the possibility that it is not so much a case of ‘what went wrong’, as that the nature of the struggle means that it will turn and twist and evolve over a long time. We thought back then that the equation was relatively simple: knock out the Taliban, give Afghanistan a UN-supervised election, provide billions for development, and surely the outcome is progress. And, of course, without an enemy using terror to disrupt and destabilise, without the tribal and warlord factions of a failed state, if the people had been allowed to do what they wanted, they would indeed have decided for progress. In fact, in so far as they could, they did, and at every election came out and showed what they wanted and what they didn’t. But even with our support, even with the activity of our forces and the aid we give, the people’s will for order has not yet been able to overcome the countervailing will for chaos.