The World

The new knowledge spread openness; but, like writing, printing and television, it could be controlled and manipulated: even in democracies, its panjandrums exercised vast secret power as despots of data, and there has never been a better tool for tyranny. Its tendency to create sequestered localities of the same-minded meant that it parochialized as many as it globalized. In many countries, mobile phones were used by people who still lived in iPhone and dagger societies, dominated by kin, tribe and sect, that could barely feed or heat their people. In some cases, terrorists were beheading people with swords while chatting via WhatsApp on their iPhones.

Less flashy but as important were the astonishing improvements in public health – reduced child mortality, smallpox vaccinations, chlorinated water. These are the result of interlinked developments high and low: the invention of the lavatory linked to sewers may have saved a billion lives since the 1860s. The doubling of human life expectancy in one century and the reduction of child mortality by a factor of ten are triumphs with no downside – except our own voracious success as a species, our population rising from a billion people in 1800 to eight billion in 2025. The industrial revolution combined with our medical revolution now threatens our own existence.

While the Net was invented by Brits and Americans and developed in Silicon Valley, where the new digital titans worked out how to make it profitable, it was the closed world that would really grasp its potential: the Chinese security services were quickest to appreciate its power of surveillance. The Russians harnessed its ability to amplify and justify rage and propagate lies in the open world. The autocracies understood quickly that their hackers could poison the delicate political anatomy of the democracies by using their very freedoms against them.

Bush was keen to meet Putin. On 16 June 2001, at a Slovenian summit, the new commande-in-chief of the unipower met the new Russian potentate. ‘I looked the man in the eye,’ said Bush, revealing the naivety of American paramountcy. ‘I found him very straightforward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul.’ Putin, fighting an Islamic insurgency in Chechnya, warned Bush of the jihadi threat to the American homeland from a new Afghan force, the Taliban. The Communists had not lasted long after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, but a vicious civil war had discredited the warlords. In Kandahar, a coterie of ex-mujahedin Ghilzai talibs (madrassa students), under Omar, a one-eyed expert RPG-7 gunner who had returned to teaching, formed a vigilante band to stop crime and corruption. Adopted and funded by the Pakistani ISI, and backed by Haqqani, the Taliban quickly conquered the country, and invited Osama bin Laden back.

PRINCE OF THE TOWERS

‘Those extremists are all being funded by Saudi Arabia,’ Putin told Bush, ‘and it is only a matter of time before it results in a major catastrophe.’

Bush was astonished. ‘I was taken aback,’ recalled Condoleeza Rice, daughter of a minister from Birmingham, Alabama, descended from slaves, who became a State Department Russianist, Stanford professor and now the first black national security advisor,^* ‘by Putin’s alarm and vehemence.’ It was they decided sour grapes after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.

Putin was right. While W had been planning his presidential run, another entitled scion of privilege was planning his own momentous mission. The older Bush’s Iraq war and protection of Saudi Arabia had horrified Osama bin Laden; he demanded an audience with King Fahd, though he was instead received by his brother Prince Sultan. Osama proposed that he reject American troops – present since the Gulf War – and let an Arab legion of mujahedin defend Mecca. Fahd trusted the bin Ladens, but dismissed Osama’s quixotic fanaticism and expelled him. He in turn despised the debauched Saudi kings for whom his father had worked: the Prophet had banned infidels from Arabia; now American troops were stationed there, while the American ally, Israel, had attacked Lebanon. Bin Laden, who received a $7 million annual income from his family, refined both his ideology and his organization, setting up in Sudan, working on his own engineering business while also setting up a network of terrorist cells, fundraisers, bomb makers, undercover operatives and the essential cannon fodder of Islamic terror, young – often teenaged – suicidists.

When his plans were ready in early 1998, he procured a fatwa from a tame cleric to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – and to ‘liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [Jerusalem] and the holy mosque of Mecca’. That August, bin Laden killed hundreds when his suicidists drove truck bombs into US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Clinton ordered missile attacks on bin Laden in Sudan, which was forced to expel the terrorist.