The Exile: The Stunning Inside Story of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Flight by Cathy Scott-Clark & Adrian Levy - review by Adrian Weale

Adrian Weale

Road to Abbottabad

The Exile: The Stunning Inside Story of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Flight

By

Bloomsbury 619pp £25
 

I suspect that most of us who are old enough to do so remember where we were on 11 September 2001. I was sitting at my desk in London, wrestling with a book proposal, when a member of a military history email discussion list (do such things still exist?) mentioned that, from his office in New Jersey, he could see smoke rising from the Twin Towers. Apparently, he said, a light aircraft had crashed into them.

For the sixteen years since then, violent Islamist radicalism has overshadowed the foreign policies of Western democracies and, increasingly, domestic security policy as well. Western interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Syria (and Iraq again) have expended blood and treasure to an enormous degree and are likely to continue