This thought-provoking little book is an attempt by a respected scholar of the Cold War to analyse the West's ongoing effort to counter violence associated with contemporary Sunni Muslim extremism by explicitly comparing what he insists on calling, unhappily, the War on Terror with that earlier conflict. This is an ambitious project demanding not only a profound knowledge of the long global struggle for influence between the Soviet Union and the United States of America but also a detailed understanding of the nature and roots of both the enormously diverse, complex and ill-defined phenomenon of radical Islam and the societies which have produced it. It is also one that will necessarily take any author onto heavily mined ground. The influence of the experience of the Cold War – or rather the understanding of the nature of the Cold War – on senior policymakers in the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led both to a failure to truly appreciate the nature of their new enemy and to terrible strategic errors such as the invasion of Iraq.

This is worth remembering when considering Katz's argument that the impending withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan and Iraq can be usefully compared to its withdrawal from Vietnam in the 1970s. Back then, conservatives criticized the decision to cut losses in Southeast Asia as likely to encourage Communists and their potential allies around the region and the world. Katz argues that the apparent successes of “Marxism” in the 1970s were in fact illusory as they led to the “overconfidence and overexpansion in the 1970s which the US was then able to exploit” (2). They also led to a general reaction against doctrinaire socialist ideologies in many of the countries that had once seemed lost to the West. The Soviet Union, of course, subsequently broke up, Marxism and its various offshoots were largely discredited as ideologies, and the USA and its allies were the eventual winners. This is possibly convincing as an account of the 1970s and 1980s but when the author extends the argument to the present day he is on more controversial ground. He argues that the apparent failure of the United States and its allies to impose order, democracy and friendly local leaders in countries they invaded in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks should not be seen, as many conservatives believe, as a humiliating failure. Instead the withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan should be seen as an opportunity which “may similarly lead to Islamic radical overconfidence and overexpansion that the United States can also use to its advantage” (2). Withdrawal, Katz says, need not mean defeat.

In the course of making this argument, Katz does make many important points. Citing Indonesia and other examples, he points out that, contrary to the views of many in Washington, Islam and democracy are far from incompatible. He also reminds us that imposing democracy is an extraordinarily difficult task. Democracy flourishes best without coercion. Above all, he appears sensitive to the complex and varied nature of the multitude of conflicts that his unhappily named “War on Terror” comprises. “The War on Terror resembles the Cold War in that it is not just one conflict but includes numerous regional and local conflicts that are linked but which have their own dynamics,” he writes (2). While Soviet–American rivalry was its predominant feature, the term the “Cold War” covers conflicts, Katz emphasizes, which had “their own distinct issues and causes – such as the quest for independence from European colonial rule, ethno-religious rivalry, order disputes, secessionist attempts and others” (17).

This is a useful insight as anyone who has spent time on the ground in any of the various theatres that comprise the “War on Terror” will appreciate. American officials in Iraq in 2006 spoke of how they had six separate “fights” under way in the relatively limited area they controlled, each involving different sets of national or subnational, ethnic or tribal, protagonists beyond the obvious conflict between the US and its local and international allies and those opposing them. Analysts and officials in Afghanistan and elsewhere now emphasize the need for local granularity in designing any policies. Indeed, the reader is left wondering why Katz bothers to use the term “War on Terror” at all. It is because, he says, “it remains the term whereby the ongoing struggle between the United States and its allies on the one hand and Al Qaeda and other radical Islamist movements and governments on the other is popularly known” (16). Perhaps, yet it has long been dumped by policymakers from President Obama down, security services, the vast proportion of analysts and anyone who appreciates the complexity and variety that Katz himself takes the trouble to underline.

Having outlined his case, Katz moves on to a survey of the reasons the United States was unable to foster democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is particularly interested in the ethnic conflicts obscured by the broader paradigms of both the Cold War and the “War on Terror.” Again, this is useful in rebutting the arguments of those who see simply a conflict between Islam and the West, reactionary religion and liberal enlightenment. But his emphasis on the ethnic factor as an explanation of American failure in both countries is too great. Katz admits that “the United States certainly bears some responsibility for Iraq's failure to make a smooth transition to democracy” and mentions briefly the early lack of troops to keep order and negligence of genuine planning for the post-Saddam transition before rapidly moving into a careful explanation of the nature and roots of the mutual enmity of Iraq's main ethnic and religious communities (26). His ultimate message seems to be that Iraq was always going to be ungovernable because of the historic demographic imbalance between Sunnis and Shias and the fact that the rule of the former, a minority, was ended by the invasion of 2003. Yet this obscures the responsibility of the occupiers themselves for the chaos that followed the deposition of Saddam Hussein. There is no mention of the incompetence of the various US-led or -appointed authorities, the reliance on corrupt and self-seeking exiles, the poor training and doctrine of the American military, the lack of interest in building a true coalition among allies, the contempt for international law, the ideologically driven decisions to dismantle much of the Iraqi state, the ignorance and arrogance of US officials, the abuse of Abu Ghraib, the clumsy treatment of both establishment Shia clerics and populist Shia leaders such as Muqtada al'Sadr, the inability to foresee or counter Iranian influence or even the huge and damaging legacy of more than a decade of US-backed United Nations sanctions.

Similarly, Katz favours the ethnic factor as an explanation for why “the prospects for building a stable democracy in Afghanistan appear nonexistent” (30). Pakistani meddling is mentioned but little else. It is true that “as in Iraq, the US-led intervention altered the existing ethnic balance in Afghanistan” by marginalizing certain Pashtun communities, but the main reason for the failure of US efforts there was not simply the prior history and ethnic composition of the country but the series of missteps and errors made by the international community which cumulatively meant that huge numbers of Pashtuns who had been perfectly happy in 2002 to support the intervention of the international community were rapidly alienated (33). So, too, it is worth pointing out, were a significant number of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara and others. It is not just Pashtun communities who are conservative, for example, and angered by attempts to push a liberal, Western human rights agenda, including women's education, or who have been disgusted by support by foreign powers for discredited warlords, or who have been disappointed by the inability of the international community to significantly better their lives.

More perplexing is Katz's description of Israel–Palestine, Iran and Pakistan as conflicts “linked to the overall War on Terror” (73). This is exactly what the most conservative commentators argue and one of the fundamentals underpinning the skewed comprehension of the nature of al Qaeda back in 2001. It is possible perhaps to say that “resolving the component conflicts in the overall War on Terror … would reduce the recruitment base for groups like al'Qaeda that have sought to make them part of the global conflict,” but, quite apart from the fact that most current thinking on radicalization of Islamic militants is moving away from the idea that young men become suicide bombers because of a particular vision of global injustice and towards an emphasis on group dynamics and processes, the links of all three to the broader struggle are tenuous in the extreme (73). That the running sore of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict bolsters the extremist argument that the “Crusader–Zionist Alliance” is set on the humiliation, subordination and division of the ummah is certainly the case but it is doubtful that this alone qualifies that conflict for inclusion in the “War on Terror.” And it is controversial indeed to suggest that, if the Kashmir dispute could be resolved, “a few Pakistanis might still take up arms for the Palestinian, Chechen, or some other cause, but probably not the majority for whom Kashmir was their primary grievance” (73). Many Pakistani groups are in fact sectarian in their agenda. Those that have traditionally focussed on Kashmir, such as Lashkar-e-Toiba, have become more radical, more numerous, larger and more powerful over the last decade despite sending only a minimal number of fighters across the Line of Control into the disputed Indian state. Even those who retain a residual interest in Kashmir have developed a strongly international perspective which compliments their local agenda. Some have been fighting in Afghanistan for several years. The resolution of the Kashmir dispute thus is more likely to unleash a vast number of militants on new targets than any sudden dissolution of groups that are very much part of the Pakistani social, political and security landscape.

Similarly, that “US withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan may well serve to intensify competition between Iran on the one hand and al'Qaeda, the Taliban, other Sunni radical groups … on the other” is plausible but ignores the complex story of how elements of the Iranian security establishment have managed relations with such groups over the last decade and a half (85). As Katz says, “Iran has clearly not yet felt threatened enough by them to ask the United States for help against their common foe” (82). This, most analysts would agree, would appear unlikely to change in the near future at least.

There are other frustrations for the careful reader. Katz describes al Qaeda as having been created in the 1990–91 Gulf crisis, whereas we have known for a decade that the group was founded in Peshawar in 1988. His suggestion that Osama bin Laden was protected by the Pakistani security establishment runs counter to the views of most experts, as well as of the CIA and other Western security services, and his policy prescriptions for Pakistan are so extraordinarily punitive – suggested to my knowledge by only the most hawkish of commentators – that they seemed designed to deliberately push a nuclear-capable nation of 180 million people in a critical strategic position into open conflict with America.

Above all, there is a lack of precision in discussions of “Islamism” which critically undermines his overall argument that the forces of radical Islam will suffer the same fate as the overconfident, overstretched Marxists in the 1970s and 1980s. There are references to “revolutionary Islamic regimes” currently in power, to Islamism, to Muslim extremism and to radical Islam, but such terms are used almost interchangeably and there is no indication of any serious attempt to differentiate either ideologically or organizationally between the jihadi Salafism of al Qaeda and its offshoots and the very different use of violence by groups such as Hamas, or between those committed to violence and those committed to using political processes to gain influence. Indeed, critically important political Islamist parties, including the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey's AKP, Pakistan's Jamaat Islami and many others, are barely discussed. The difference between the last party and, say, Jamaat-e-ulema-e-Islami, a Deobandi neotraditionalist but politically pragmatic group, is important, for example.

The result is that the forces of revolutionary Islam that will be supposedly undermined by their own overextension following the US withdrawal are never really identified. In Iraq, the reader is left wondering if Katz talking about the Shia in general, with their conservative and often nonpoliticized loyalty to a rigid hierarchy of clerics, or just the (not particularly revolutionary or Islamic) government of Shia Nuri al'Maliki? Is he referring to the (Sunni) al Qaeda in Iraq or the forces of the firebrand Shia populist cleric Moqtada al'Sadr? As for Afghanistan, the suggestion that the Taliban, should they take power, would eventually alienate their own supporters is entirely credible. But this immediately raises two important further points which Katz does not address. First of all, why should local disaffection with the Taliban, or indeed any radical Islamic regime anywhere in the Muslim world, necessarily translate into support for the West or at least for doctrines seen as Western? To believe so is to underestimate the depth of anti-Americanism and of social conservatism and the extent to which “democracy” has become synonymous with what is seen as creeping cultural imperialism in Afghanistan as in much of the rest of the Muslim world. Disaffection with radical Islamism is more likely to lead to support for less radical Islamists than to a sudden wave of popularity for liberal, pro-Western and often elite parties or activists. One of the reasons the Arab uprisings could support “democracy” was because Hosni Mubarak, Ben Ali and company were both autocratic and backed by the West. A desire for democracy thus became compatible with being Muslim, Arab, Egyptian etc. Even then the liberal fringe who received such coverage in the Western media are now without any significant political weight or popular support.

Second, given the shifting, chaotic, dynamic and fragmented state of contemporary Sunni Muslim violent extremism, and its often parochial, fiercely local nature, Katz fails to explain why the withdrawal of US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan should have any significant impact outside the immediate region. The success or failure of a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, for example, will be determined by its ability to resolve some of that country's deep social problems while convincing the population that their leaders authentically represent and protect their culture and identity. Likewise, the influence of decisions by US policymakers on the success of the post-Islamism of someone like Tayyip Recep Erdogan; on the attraction of the thinking of someone like Tariq Ramadan, the Oxford-based scholar and writer, to tens of millions of Muslims in Europe; or on the success or failure of leaders of Nigeria's Boko Haram or supporters of Somalia's al'Shabab is negligible. The future of Hamas and Hezbollah will not be decided in Washington. There is no global directive committee of Islamist leaders who might become “overconfident.” There is no global movement to be undermined by overextension. To believe so is to fall into the trap that ensnared US policymakers in the early years of the last decade who thought that attacks on states could deter Islamic terrorism.

The American withdrawals from Iraq and from Afghanistan do not provide an opportunity for long-term victory, whatever that would look like, for Washington in the War on Terror, whatever that is, but evidence of the inability of US policymakers in the early years of the twenty-first century to achieve stated, if extremely ambitious, foreign-policy objectives. The US withdrew from Iraq because, particularly given the state of the economy, they could do little else. Barack Obama has made the degree to which financial compulsions govern his decisions on Afghanistan, too, abundantly clear. One of the few positive consequences of the failures of these two interventions has been the new realism among American policymakers about their ability to project power across the globe and a reluctance to repeat such costly adventures. This may allow the various peoples and states of the Islamic world to sort out some of their own problems alone.