What was this explosion I was talking about? I find myself writing almost the same thing a couple of years later in The Independent - I refer to "the explosion to come" without locating it in the Middle East at all. One, dated 1991, is even splashed with a dark and viscous substance, the oil that came raining down on us from the skies over the Kuwaiti desert after Saddam blew up the wells of the Emirate. It was only after a few minutes that I realised what I was looking for: some hint, back in the days of dangerous innocence, of what was going to happen on 11 September 2001. And sure enough, in one notebook, part of a transcript of an interview I gave in Toronto in the late 1990s, I see myself trying to discourage the Middle East optimism of my host. It materialises in the moment of the attack and vanishes again into the global space the moment after..

A few days after Lebanon's latest war came to an end, I went through many of the reporter's notebooks I have used in my last 30 years in the Middle East. Some contained the names of dead colleagues, others the individual stories of the suffering of Arabs and Kurds and Christians and Jews. It has deliberately given up most of the attributes of physical form. Its most powerful weapon is its ability to remain an idea, an ethereal concept, floating in the global space, where it can morph, draw recruits, plan operations and execute them without any of the cumbersome and vulnerable paraphernalia of a conventional military structure. Al-Qa'ida no longer has physical bases in the military sense of the word. It has little or no structure, and only a tiny tangible physical presence.

He was, I guessed, of Pakistani origin, with intense eyes, a prayer cap, a loose kurta, and the kind of moustache-less beard that tabloids associate with Muslim fundamentalists He could have been my cousin Look at this racial profiling, I thought to myself. Here's this fellow, perfectly harmless, and everyone's staying clear like he's planning to kill them. And then they wonder why Muslims in Britain feel ostracised.. We have understood for some time that lawlessness in one state can affect the peace of states and peoples, not just in the region, but across the globe. Our failure to finish the job and establish stability in Afghanistan, after the Soviets left, was paid for in blood and terror on the streets of New York just over a decade later.