PB: Yes. In fact, al-Qaeda is being defeated. But I’m not at all sure we are winning the war against terror.

MG: Yes, I do agree with that because I do think that there are demonstrable gains that we’ve made in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re reversible but they are demonstrable and that’s helpful. We have a very difficult situation in Pakistan but we also know that we have allies there. One of the things I’ve tried to argue, and I don’t know how helpful this is, is that al-Qaeda is not the only Islamist terror group and that with Hamas and Hizbollah you have organisations that don’t consider themselves to be kin to al-Qaeda but they have a common ideological root in people like al-Banna and the writing of Qutb and others. When it comes to appreciating the nature of the threat we face, while there’s always a tendency to compartmentalise conflicts, the war in Iraq, the struggle in Afghanistan, the Middle East, actually it’s helpful to see the ideological parentage of these groups and to appreciate why it is that they act in the way that they do.

For example, if you’re looking at someone like Mohammed Atta [one of the 9/11 hijackers], he was horrified by what he saw as the Westernisation, the West’s toxification of the Arab city, the Arab townscape. It’s similar to the way in which Qutb was horrified by Western culture, which he encountered when he visited the United States, and reinforces your point that every terrorism is a sort of dark mirror image of a particular cultural development. It also helps us to understand that when you’re dealing with Hamas or Hizbollah or al-Qaeda they’re not simply objecting to a particular territorial boundary or a particularly, as they see it, inequitable distribution of resources in the world; there’s a deep cultural rage or anger that they have towards an idea of the West or an ideal of freedom. They’re defending a mythologised version of their culture, but they’re defending a version of their culture against what they see as Western liberal pollution.