CURRENT AFFAIRS:An impressive 'anthropology of 9/11' and the latest 'Granta', which explores how the world has changed since 2001, are fine contributions to understanding the impact of the attacks on the World Trade Center

BILL McSWEENEYreviews The 9/11 WarsBy Jason Burke Allen Lane, 709pp. £30

HIDDEN HIGH IN THE mountain caves of northern Afghanistan, the man who plotted the drama, and humiliated the greatest country on Earth, was expecting his end. Just three months after 9/11, B-52 bombers were visiting their celebrated “shock and awe” on the rabble of Taliban groups as they darted from one hideout to another to protect the leader who inspired al-Qaeda, who financed it and who now watched as the infidels closed in on it. Osama bin Laden was resigned to meeting his death in Tora Bora. “If it were not for treachery,” he confided bitterly to his laptop, “the situation would not be what it is now.”

Two days later, however, he had slipped the net and escaped. As US forces celebrated prematurely and declared a victorious end to the battle of Tora Bora on December 16th, 2001, bin Laden and his trusty subordinate Ayman al-Zawahiri were on their way through the impossible terrain that led to safer havens in Pakistan. The White House boasted that fewer than 3,000 troops had achieved “broad military success”. It had been cheap and quick, a “bargain” as President Bush put it.

Some bargain. Earlier, with the dust still unsettled from the fallout of 9/11 and the bodies still not counted, the White House had spotted another bargain, this time in Iraq. This one would be “a piece of cake”, over in weeks. Ten years later, the United States is still embroiled in the longest and costliest war in its history. (Burke cites a 2009 estimate of military expenditure at $661 billion. But a comprehensive report published this year by Brown University calculates the total US bill for both wars at a staggering $3.7 trillion, and it could reach $4.4 trillion. Most of these awesome costs were incurred after President Bush landed in full flight gear on the Abraham Lincoln, on May 1st, 2003, to declare, “Mission accomplished.”)

Jason Burke, the Guardian’s Asia correspondent, is one of the most respected and experienced foreign correspondents in the business, a sort of Orla Guerin of the print media. He documented his extensive travels through the Middle East and Asia with his outstanding On the Road to Kandahar, in which he dissected the internal conflicts of the Islamic world before and after 9/11. In Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, his widely praised analysis of the history and politics of Islamic radicalism, he established a reputation at once as a major authority on the politics and organisation of Islamic extremism and as a talented writer with the rare gift of joining effortless prose to challenging scholarship.

He marshals both talents in this latest book, with the aim of exploring the violence arising from the events of 9/11 from the point of view of the actors in the various theatres of war. As Burke says, the focus is not on the substance of decisions made in the capitals of the West but on their effects; on providing the reader with “a grubby view from below, rather than a lofty view from above”.

The book begins early in 2001 in the snows of Bamiyan, a poor Afghan town high in the Himalayas and home to giant Buddhas carved in the sixth century by Buddhist monks. The statues had survived 14 centuries of Mongolian and other medieval brutalities since their carving, only to fall now to the dogma and dynamite of Mullah Omar and his Taliban zealots.

Ali Shah, a boy of 16, took time off from minding his sheep to watch one evening as the zealots moved into place to prepare the destruction of the offending icons. Burke spoke to him years later, when all that the Taliban savagery portended had come to pass.

The immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks make for mostly familiar reading: the enthusiasm of Vice President Cheney and the inner cabal of neoconservatives to grasp the hand of history and exploit the tragedy in the interest of a higher cause as they saw it. Within 24 hours Cheney and his allies had set their subordinates to work to establish the link between al-Qaeda and Saddam, thus clearing the way for the victory they really wanted in the war against Iraq.

The United States’ allies in that war did not escape the attention of Islamic extremists. Burke gives a lively and detailed account of the cool, cruel bombers who shared bin Laden’s values and who no longer needed his advice and money to implement them.

There was a score to settle with the Brits and the Spaniards. At 8.24am on July 7th, 2005, four men hugged each other outside a Boots pharmacy in King’s Cross in London, “euphoric, as if they were celebrating something”, as a witness later recounted. By 8.50am they had bombed themselves into martyrdom and innocent bystanders into oblivion, just as their coreligionists had done in Madrid a year earlier.

The decision to publish his book now almost cost Burke and his publisher the opportunity to incorporate the Arab Spring into his overall analysis: a month earlier and he would have missed the series of events this year that justify the overall approach of the book. Given the nature of the north African rebellions – arising from the suicide of a fruit and vegetable seller in Tunisia and spreading within days to the streets of Cairo – their occurrence is a vindication of Burke’s decision to eschew the attempt to explain from on high and to give us instead his “grubby” view of politics, an anthropology of 9/11. It is a magnificent achievement.

Burke ends his sweep of the violent consequences of 9/11 with a tentative suggestion that, even if southeast Asia endures as a cauldron of anger, it is now an anger repressed. As such it holds out the promise of a peace of sorts.

The vision of an apocalyptic clash between good and evil, preached by ideologues on both sides of the East-West divide, has blurred into a precarious stand-off.

The young shepherd reappears at the end of Burke’s story – now a sad, dishevelled 24-year-old who has dodged through the gaps of the 9/11 wars in search of a normal life only to find himself still a fugitive eight years later. “I am now very tired,” he said to the author as he waited disconsolately in Dunkirk, eyeing the trucks heading for the UK. “I would like to go home.”

Bill McSweeney is research fellow in international peace studies at Trinity College Dublin

MOLLY McCLUSKEYreviews Granta 116: Ten Years LaterEdited by John Freeman Granta, 249pp. £12.99

THE NEW ISSUE OF Granta, dedicated to exploring how the world has changed in the decade since the attacks of September 11th, looks at "what we remember and forget in the wake of terror and how we tell the stories of our time". Some of the pieces in Granta 116: Ten Years Lateroffer explicit analyses of the post-9/11 world; others approach the brief with degrees of indirection.

An edginess pervades the collection, a sense of people and places under siege, of powerlessness and of power wielded in ignorance or vengeance. The post-9/11 worlds depicted are ones in which prejudice, paranoia and violence prevail.

The one deviation from these modes is a beautiful and unashamedly wistful piece on Baghdad College, written by the New York Timesforeign correspondent Anthony Shadid. Shadid spoke with former teachers and students and produced an elegiac homage not only to the college, run for 37 years by New England Jesuits as a multiethnic, multifaith school "in which a secular sense of self often held sway", but to bygone versions of both Iraq and the US. Now, he writes, each views the other as anonymous and menacing. "Reeling from wars, adrift in the most painful nostalgia, Iraq has changed far more than Americans ever realised. In these days, America seems only to lend the crass commercialism of its globalised self."

Another standout is Declan Walsh's account of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) of northwest Pakistan, which occupy "a dark place in the Western imagination as a dystopian emirate of chaos, spewing violence in every direction". Walsh, formerly an Africa reporter for The Irish Timesand now the Guardian's correspondent for Pakistan and Afghanistan, traces the changing character of the Fata, from British colonial rule to the jihad against Soviet troops in the 1980s and the rise of US-funded rebel training camps, to being a target of US drones in the present.

A Handful of Walnutsis an excerpt from Ahmed Errachidi's forthcoming memoir. Errachidi was held in extrajudicial detention at Guantánamo for five years before public pressure resulted in his release in 2007. A chef in London at the time of 9/11, he travelled to Morocco to see family shortly after the attacks, and then went on to Pakistan. Looking to make quick money for an urgently needed heart operation for his son, he planned to buy silver jewellery for resale in Morocco. Arrested by Pakistani police, he was turned over to the US, tortured for 19 days at Bagram air base, and eventually sent to Guantánamo.

In A Tale of Two Martyrs, the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun presents a stark portrait of the fates of two men: the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi ("the universal citizen who runs out of patience"), who set himself alight last December, triggering a revolution in Tunisia; and an Egyptian named Sayed Bilal, innocent resident of Alexandria, who, because the police needed a culprit for a suicide bombing, was tortured to death last January.

Soldier turned journalist Elliot Woods travels across the US, meeting some depressingly predictable characters before introducing us to the more interestingly conflicted figure of the former infantryman Daniel Steciak; in Libya, the war journalist Janine di Giovanni tells the story of a Benghazi graffiti artist named Kais al-Hilali. Kais, who specialised in scathing illustrations of Gadafy, was shot dead in March at what his mother describes as a fake checkpoint.

The fiction in Ten Years Laterincludes a story by the former US marine Phil Klay, who deployed to Iraq as a public-affairs officer. He is a writer of sharp literary sensibilities, and his prose, here and elsewhere, has a rhythmic quality that makes comparisons with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carriedhard to avoid. On being stuck on high alert in a US shopping mall: "Here's what orange is. You don't see or hear like you used to. Your brain chemistry changes. You take in every piece of the environment, everything. I could spot a dime in the street twenty yards away. I had antennae out that stretched down the block".

The Canadian novelist Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's Laikas I,set in a version of Toronto in which packs of feral dogs roam the streets, depicts a world of scapegoating, rambling fears and guilt by association. The Somali writer Nuruddin Farah writes in Crossbonesof a father – an honest, upright diaspora Somali who "hasn't the proper hardiness for this situation" – visiting a Somali warlord in an effort to locate his son.

Nadeem Aslam's Punnu's Jihadconcerns a young man held captive by an Afghan warlord and is, like his fiction generally, seamlessly plotted, lushly unfurled and rooted in characters that feel as much archetypes as they do individuals. He describes a pile of corpses "full of insect scribble . . . the eyes ruined but still dreaming of returning to whatever Egypts, Algerias, Yemens, Pakistans and Saudi Arabias they had known . . . men who came to the jihad because, well, to be honest, Punnu, there wasn't much else to do".

In The Third Mate, an extract from the American writer Adam Johnson's new novel, North Korean fishermen pass the night listening to radio transmissions and gathering shark fins for the Chinese until they are broadsided by the US, first in the form of hundreds of Nikes that get caught in their nets, then in the form of men who board their small boat from a US interceptor ship.

Issue 116 is rounded out by a striking photo essay by Nadia Shira Cohen, depicting refugee life on the border between Libya and Tunisia, where tens of thousands of migrant workers have fled since the start of the conflict in Libya; a slim vignette by Nicole Krauss; observations on air travel by Pico Iyer; and poems by Lawrence Joseph and Jynne Martin. It offers dispatches from some of the world's most troubled zones and a sampling of some very strong writing.

Molly McCloskey is a novelist, essayist and short-story writer. Her most recent book, the memoir Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother, was published by Penguin Ireland in July