Old and New Terrorism
By Peter Neumann
Polity, $14.99

As this book is published, a debate continues on the purpose of British – and all Nato  – troops in Afghanistan. As deaths spike upwards, as declared insufficiencies in equipment are put to the British government by increasingly politicised generals, as reporters ask the bereaved if they believe the mission to be worth the deaths they mourn, so the alternative of scuttle and run rises, higher with every editorial. So too does the need for a solid answer, something in which the public can have some faith.

One such answer is what was called honour. A commitment was made, both explicitly and implicitly, to support a government in Kabul that strives to be representative: to pull out when the Afghan armed forces’ control over the country and will to fight are still partial would be a betrayal. More often cited is a utilitarian rationale: that it is in the valleys and caves of Helmand where terror with potentially global reach will incubate – and that defeat there and in places like it, however ceded, will make terror cells in Bradford, Rotterdam or Clichy-sous-Bois more likely to spring to life and more confident of success, even if through martyrdom.

Peter Neumann’s valuable book – valuable because plain and comprehensible, ploughing a straight furrow through two decades of intensive “terrorism studies” – reminds us that the “new” networked terrorism can operate, at least for a time, from a cave or a valley; that a victory in Helmand resonates through jihadist websites and mindsets the world over; and that these networks both bind and unleash those within them.

They bind those inspired by jihad to charismatic figures and to a transcendent vision; and they loose those so inspired upon their own part of the world, both charged and free to do what damage they can, whenever and however they can. New terrorism has broken with old terrorism in many ways: above all in replacing a hierarchical, quasi-military structure (the provisional IRA was particularly attached to that, though it adapted) with a flat, cellular network, through which pulses the categorical imperative to make war on Zionists and Crusaders, guilty by their religion, their ethnicity and their colonial past.

The reassuring message from Neumann’s work is that the demonic energy that drove this jihad may in some areas be waning – in part because of a series of robust responses from western states, in part because the sanguinary certainties of al-Qaeda are being challenged from within. Drawing on the work of Lawrence Wright, a contemporary American chronicler of jihadism, Neumann high- lights the dissenting voices that have emerged from within al-Qaeda and its sphere in the past two years – most boldly from Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, the Egyptian Islamist better known as “Dr Fadl” who once led the terrorist group Al-Jihad. He, astonishingly, argues that “there is nothing in the Sharia about killing Jews and Nazarenes [Christians] . . . if vice is mixed with virtue, all becomes sinful”.

Less reassuring is that the remorseless engines of globalisation grind on, rendering attachments of many years hollow and futile – and “the more traditional identities get hollowed out, the more likely people are to look for alternative providers of meaning and certainty, including fundamentalist religion and other particularist narratives”.

One of the key distinguishing features of “old” as opposed to “new” terrorism is that the former was often constrained by its attachment to universalism, or by the assumption that, sooner or later, the terrorist group may wish to transform itself into a responsible negotiator, even in government (the IRA, again, writes the book on this). Marxist groups especially were deeply conflicted by their universalism: how could they countenance large-scale terror when proletarians might be the victims? Indeed, as Neumann notes, they have largely disappeared (not necessarily forever). But jihadist terror has shown few such inhibitions: it is violently particularist; it sees “collaborationist” Muslims as at least as much the problem as non-Muslims; and until the recent debates was largely untroubled by the fact that many of its victims were themselves Muslim.

This is not a piece of closely worked journalism such as Wright’s extraordinary The Looming Tower (2006); nor does it have the theoretical and historical energy of Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent (2008). But in reminding us that “late modernity and globalisation”, coupled with “media saturation and desensitisation”, prompt terrorists to engage in “ever more vicious forms of violence in order to ‘get through’”, it is to be recommended for its careful modesty of approach (and its brevity). It also makes clearer why “we” are in Afghanistan, and must stay.

The writer is an FT columnist