Provocative look at decade of fear

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Enlarge Image

Afghan soldiers and police display captured Taliban munitions.

The official histories of the wars following the 9/11 attacks -- Iraq, Afghanistan, and a host of smaller, sometimes unseen actions -- won't be published for several years yet.

In the meantime, Toronto Star reporter Michelle Shephard provides a series of glimpses of the different front lines in these wars, and while her book lacks a coherent narrative, the vignettes and interviews she includes in A Decade of Terror present facets of the post-9/11 world that are often fascinating and provocative.

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Shephard's first book, Guantanamo's Child (2008), told the story of Canadian child jihadi Omar Khadr. The children profiled in this book are less ambiguous characters than Khadr.

One Somali teen tells Shephard about the judicial amputation of his hand and foot, carried out without anesthetic and in front of a crowd of spectators at a local stadium. His crime? He chose to seek a high school education, rather than to join the local al-Qaida franchise.

Days later, an official judged that since his foot had been severed at the ankle, his punishment had been insufficient, and ordered several inches of the teen's lower leg sawed off.

The courage to venture into such parts of the world, to witness such atrocities and then to describe them for the benefit of comfortable Canadians, shines through in all the chapters of the book, many of which are expanded from previously published journalism.

A writer grappling with this subject must be honest and unflinching, and Shephard's stories about Somalia, Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan are certainly that.

Perhaps the biggest strength of Decade of Fear is its window on failed states and those who struggle to live therein. It can be hard for Canadians to grasp how precarious life is in a society with no government but that provided by tribal leaders, and no justice other than extremist religious courts.

Particularly when she chronicles her travels through Pakistan, Shephard makes it clear that no parties in that region have truly clean hands.

Another strength of the book is in how it is contextualized. Before 9/11 few people knew where Afghanistan was, or had heard of the Taliban. The first iterations of commentary and analysis thus tended to present al-Qaida as a new phenomenon, which sprouted from nowhere like mushrooms in spring grass.

While Shephard writes about a decade of fear, she discusses the early warnings about Islamic terrorism, such as the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. She also shows how the instability that has pervaded Pakistan since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was indispensable to the rise of al-Qaida.

The only major weakness is the moral relativism that seeps into the writing, finding the cracks in Shephard's objectivity. "Being on the side of good," she asserts, "really depends on where you're standing." Does it really?

It's astonishing that someone so cosmopolitan can say this with a straight face, particularly after meeting with child amputees, touring a school for terrorists, and speaking with journalists reeling from the savage murder of reporter Daniel Pearl.

But even if Shephard finds the line between good and evil to be blurry, her readers likely won't, which is a testament in itself to the power of her writing.

Late in the book, she tells of meeting a Somali who obtained refugee status in Norway. He fled Mogadishu because his parents were shot in the head at close range by fundamentalists linked to al- Qaida. The reason for the militants' suspicions? His parents allowed their son to work for Coca-Cola, which the killers claimed was a Jewish company. (It's not.)

Contrary to Shephard's own assertion, it's not difficult at all to tell if you're standing on the side of good, when the events she documents are taking place around the world.

Rebecca Walberg is a Winnipeg writer and researcher.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 8, 2011 J7