‘West has failed to eradicate radical Islam’

Seeking to take stock of what he calls the ‘9/11 Wars’,journalist Jason Burke on Wednesday said neither of the main parties involved in the 10-year-old conflict had emerged from it victorious.

“The West has failed in its more ambitious aims of entirely eradicating radical Islam. In fact,it has polarised the situation to a point where it is much worse. At the same time,al-Qaeda has failed in its strategic aim,which was to rally hundreds of millions of people in the Islamic world to a radical flag. Both have failed in their key objectives,” Burke said.

Burke,the South Asia correspondent of The Guardian and The Observer newspapers,has extensively covered the Middle East and South Asia,specialising in conflict,terrorism and Islamic militancy. He is the author of Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam,On the Road to Kandahar: Travels through Conflict in the Islamic World and the recently-released The 9/11 Wars.

On Wednesday,Burke was at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) of South Asia,at a discussion moderated by Simon Denyer of the Washington Post,who is also the president of FCC.