Bush throws in talking points into his speeches on how terrorists don’t build schools or hospitals; he’s wrong. That’s exactly what they do, and exactly why they’re loved: why Usamah bin Ladin is hailed as the Mahdi by a disturbingly large percentage of the Muslim population. In Western reports, we talk about how money is “laundered” through Islamic charities to terrorist networks. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of what we’re fighting. The charities are the terrorist networks. Our definition of “terrorism” is the use of violence or intimidation to achieve political ends, on the part of non-state actors. But the use of violence and intimidation to achieve political ends is precisely what defines the state, so terrorism is simply a network that acts like a state, but is not recognized as such. The Islamic charities in question are what archaeologists would call the “legitimizing activities” of these aspiring states, the provision of basic services that makes them legitimate. Hamas was not elected because they blow up Israelis; they were elected because they provide such great health care. Al Qa’ida is not loved for bringing down the World Trade Center; they are loved for all the hospitals and schools they helped build in Afghanistan, when the U.S. no longer needed the Afghans as proxies against the U.S.S.R. An episode of The Daily Show criticized the requirement of loyalty to Hizb’allah before it would help rebuilding the homes of those people left homeless by the war—but isn’t that precisely the Faustian bargain that the United States also strikes with its citizens? Loyalty (and material support extracted in taxes), and in return they might help you in a crisis (see Hurricane Katrina).

As states become larger, their ability to provide basic services is undercut, so those services must be provided in other ways. Most commonly, they are provided by less complex networks that spring up. In the Middle East, those networks include al Qa’ida, Hizb’allah, and Hamas. Thus, the state loses legitimacy, which passes to smaller-scale, less complex, networks aspiring to statehood. The New Map is no longer necessarily married to Cartesian space; instead, the important point are networks of influence and contact that are fluid and recognize few geographical borders. This represents a loss of an established level of complexity, and thus, this is collapse.