[M]uch of the jihadist movement today flourishes in regions poorly integrated into the global order during the age of Empire. The language is a means to legitimise and draw support for traditional elites seeking to retain their authority against the efforts of the modern world to impose itself. The fundamental challenge before the international system, thus, isn’t to defeat the Taliban or al-Qaeda. It is to integrate these regions into the complex systems of norms that bind the modern system of states.

Britain in India, the Dutch in Indonesia and, later, the US in the Philippines, used military force to deal with the Islamist uprisings which targeted them. But they also encouraged the growth of modern nationalist movements, set up bureaucratic and administrative institutions that brought about a dramatic expansion of government, and restructured the relationship between state, political structures and civil society.

Today this is called “nation-building”. In Afghanistan, it almost without doubt isn’t going to be anywhere near completion by 2014. But if it isn’t, the end of the war there is profoundly unlikely to mean the beginning of peace.