According to the New Yorker, anyway, and its reviewer, James Wood. Wood does something interesting in his review of two recent bits of fiction, Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self (Knopf) and Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions (Dutton) – "both set in the radical underground of late-sixties and and early-seventies agitation," both featuring characters "who find themselves politically trapped" in the same kind of "sticky web of accident" that trumped the pornographer Verloc of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Wood notes that "recent American fiction dealing with Islamic terrorists has shown more interest in the fanatic than in the failure, in resolution than in irresolution, and a certain human complexity has been sacrificed." He references the liminal banality (banal liminality?) of Conrad’s Victorian anarchist underground to suggest "necessary novelistic transferences, displacements from contemporary ideological radicalism" are at play:  neither book "is by an American – Carey is Australian and Kunzru British – and neither is about Islamic terrorists". More, "The novels share an interest in the slow rotting of the ideological harvest, and in the way that eventual political failure was birthed by the very exaggeration of political success."

Wood, James. "Notes From the Underground: Fugitive Lives by Peter Carey and Hari Kunzru." New Yorker (3 March 2008), p. 79.

The full version of Arithmetic on the Frontier, courtesy of the Kipling Society webpages.

A GREAT and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe –
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: " All flesh is grass."

Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villainous saltpetre".
And after?- Ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our ‘ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station-
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar’s downward blow.
Strike hard who cares – shoot straight who can
The odds are on the cheaper man.

One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem.
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.

The Kipling Society @ http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_arith.htm

And this one, too, in last week’s Economist. Discussing NATO’s role in Afghanistan, the newspaper notes "The old truth of counter-insurgency still holds: armies can win every battle, yet lose the will to fight an intractable war." Lord Ashdown, "the British politician and ex-commando who was nearly appointed as the United Nations’ envoy to Kabul," is cited for his entirely apropos reference to Kipling, (right, so that’s me, quoting the Economist’s anonymous correspondent, quoting Ashdown, quoting Kipling), who in his poem Arithmetic on the Frontier, "describ[ed] the British empire’s troubles fighting Afghan tribesmen armed with the jezail, a home-made musket:

A scrimmage in a Border Station
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.

The Economist’s correspondent writes "In such a fight against a weaker but elusive enemy, says Kipling, ‘the odds are on the cheaper man’." 

"The State of NATO: A Ray of Light in the Dark Defile." The Economist (27 May 2008).

Stumbled over this pearl while doing some desktop research. Paul Brians, a literature professor at Washington State University, has online study notes for, among other topics, Dostoyeksy’s Notes From the Underground. On NFTU’s protagonist, the Underground Man: “Consider the UM as a complex portrait, lacking surface appeal, but filled with fascinating detail which reveals itself only upon close examination.”

Brians, Paul. Study Guide for Dostoyevsky: Notes from Underground  N.D.

Or just a little common sense, you decide. Today’s Int’l Herald Tribune carried an interesting item on the development of a strategy of disruption and deterrence against terrorists by focusing on their message and credibility. The authors, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, quote Michael Leiter, acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who states "We’ve now begun to develop more sophisticated thoughts about deterrence looking at each one of those," going on to note that "Terrorists don’t operate in a vacuum."

Purveyors of conventional wisdom, which was never less than schizophrenic on this, have been browbeating us for years with the idea that in fact they do operate in a vacuum – or at least in a power vacuum. Not what Leiter meant, I guess. I quote:

Interviews with more than two dozen senior officials involved in the effort provided the outlines of previously unreported missions to mute Al Qaeda’s message, turn the jihadi movement’s own weaknesses against it and illuminate Al Qaeda’s errors whenever possible. A primary focus has become cyberspace, which is the global haven of terrorist networks.

Fair enough. Virtual this-and-that is heavily overblown, but I take the point. There are some eye-popping one-liners, too:

For obvious reasons, it is harder to deter terrorists than it was to deter a Soviet attack.

Right. Not that a Soviet attack ever actually had to be deterred. That was about threat perception, too, wasn’t it?

Terrorists hold no obvious targets for American retaliation as Soviet cities, factories, military bases and silos were under the Cold War deterrence doctrine. And it is far harder to pinpoint the location of a terrorist group’s leaders than it was to identify the Kremlin offices of the Politburo bosses, making it all but impossible to deter attacks by credibly threatening a retaliatory attack. But over the six and a half years since the Sept. 11 attacks, many terrorist leaders, including Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, have successfully evaded capture, and U.S. officials say they now recognize that threats to kill terrorist leaders may never be enough to keep America safe.

OK. Good….

So U.S. officials have spent the last several years trying to identify other types of "territory" that extremists hold dear, and they say they believe that one important aspect may be the terrorists’ reputation and credibility with Muslims.

<!–
pagination –>The idea that terrorist safe havens can be more than just mountain hideouts is an important shift. More:

Terrorists hold little or no terrain, except on the Web. "Al Qaeda and other terrorists’ center of gravity lies in the information domain, and it is there that we must engage it," said Dell Dailey, the State Department’s counterterrorism chief.

Three cheers for post-modern counterterrorism.  Terrain as metaphor. The message it has taken root.

Schmitt, Eric and Shanker, Thom.  "U.S. Adapts Cold War Idea to Fight Terrorists." International Herald Tribune (18 March 2008).