Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror (ISBN 1-85043-396-8) is a 2003 book by Jason Burke

Jason Burke

Jason Burke is a British journalist and the author of several non-fiction books. A correspondent covering South Asia for The Observer and The Guardian, he is based in New Delhi as of 2010. In his years of journalism, Burke has addressed a wide range of topics including politics, social affairs and...

 about the history and goals of Osama bin Laden's

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...

 Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda is a global broad-based militant Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden sometime between August 1988 and late 1989. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a radical Sunni Muslim movement calling for global Jihad...

 and a loose amalgam of related groups. Using first-hand descriptions of terrorist camps, Burke attempts to illustrate that the west's misunderstanding of the diversity of modern Islamic militancy undermines the response to terrorism. The author asserts that the United States' focus on Al-Qaida is ultimately a waste of time, saying that the west must instead "win the hearts and minds" of the Islamic world to effectively counter terrorism.

Published by I. B. Tauris (November 13, 2004) in Hardcover

Hardcover

A hardcover, hardback or hardbound is a book bound with rigid protective covers...

 (304 pages)

Jason Burke also wrote the book Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam (ISBN 1-85043-666-5).