Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed (born 1978) is a British author and investigative journalist. He is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development (IPRD), an independent think tank focused on the study of violent conflict in the context of global ecological, energy and economic crises; and a film-maker who has co-produced and written The Crisis of Civilization, and associate produced Grasp the Nettle, both directed by Dean Puckett. Ahmed's academic work has focused on the systemic causes of mass violence. He has taught at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, and has lectured at Brunel University’s Politics & History Unit at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, for courses in international relations theory, contemporary history, empire and globalization. He is a former environment blogger for The Guardian, writing regularly for the website from March 2013 to July 2014.
Ahmed contributes a weekly column to Middle East Eye, the London-based news portal founded by an ex-Guardian leader writer David Hearst, and is 'System Shift' columnist at VICE's Motherboard. Ahmed is founding editor of Insurge Intelligence, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project, and has been on the editorial board of The Canary, a left-wing political blog, since June 2016.

Education and career

Ahmed received an M.A. in contemporary war & peace studies and a DPhil (April 2009) in international relations from the School of Global Studies at Sussex University, where he taught for a period in the Department of International Relations.

He is a member of the Executive Committee of the British Muslim Human Rights Centre at London Metropolitan University’s Human Rights and Social Justice Institute. Formerly, he was a senior researcher at the Islamic Human Rights Commission.

Ahmed's main focus is on Western military action, counterinsurgency, the war on terror, and the interconnections of systemic global crises.

Books

The War on Freedom and The War on Truth

Ahmed's first book, The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001, was praised by the American essayist Gore Vidal "The Enemy Within", an essay published by The Observer in which Vidal described Ahmed's book as "the best and most balanced report" on 9/11. Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair later took issue with Vidal for his approval of the book describing its author as being "wedded to half-baked conspiracy-mongering" about 9-11. In a later comment, Hitchens wrote that "nobody has yet been fool enough to accept his [Ahmed's] argument that the attacks on New York and Washington were part of a pre-arrangement involving the United States government".

Ahmed's later book, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism, follows up from his first book, with a critical evaluation of the findings of the 9/11 Commission. In The War on Truth, he argues that the United States government was involved in the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington and Ahmed has asserted that the "alleged hijackers had trained in US military installations in the 1990s, and even had connections to the CIA and DEA."

However, Ahmed wrote on his blog in 2014: "I'm on record in a number of places pointing out that simple physical anomalies cannot be used to justify conclusions of a government conspiracy. ... So I kind of end up pissing off basically everyone, 'troofers', 'anti-troofers', and a lot in between."

A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization

Ahmed's book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It, received a notice in The Guardian which commented: "Ahmed could be charged with a certain ebullience in his delineating of potential catastrophe, which will necessitate 'the dawn of a post-carbon civilisation'. But his arguments are in the main forceful and well-sourced, with particularly good sections on agribusiness, US policies of 'energy security', and what he terms the 'securitisation' of ordinary life by western governments."

In The Oil Drum, Jeff Vail, a former US Department of Interior analyst specialising in energy infrastructure, "highly recommends" the book, concluding: "In the end, if the crisis of our modern civilization can be solved—or at least if the transition to whatever replaces it can be softened—then it will be through a syncretic understanding of the system of threats we face, such as that presented by Dr. Ahmed, that pave the way."

A review in Marx & Philosophy of Books, however, criticises the book's approach to systems theory with regards to Ahmed's proposed solutions. Although the reviewer, Dr Robert Drury King, an assistant professor at Sierra Nevada College specialising in systems, acknowledges that "Ahmed draws convincingly and commandingly on a number of fields, including climate sciences, geology, monetary and financial economics, and systems theory, among many others. The impressive scope of the book owes to the fact that Ahmed is very deliberately a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary scholar" - he questions whether there is "a clear and feasible notion of systematicity" that is "applied methodologically to the resolution of the identified crises." King says that "Ahmed’s proposed solutions to global, systemic crises remain, in fact, largely unarticulated in systematic terms" and amount largely to "voluntaristic, wishful-thinking."

Following the publication of the book, Ahmed's chance meeting with filmmaker Dean Puckett led to the development of a feature documentary, The Crisis of Civilization. It was received positively by Hitcham Yezza, editor of Ceasefire magazine, for whom the "film is necessary viewing, not just for activists but for anyone who’s planning to hang around this planet for the foreseeable future."

Controversies

Nafeez Ahmed's disagreement with Christopher Hitchens over Gore Vidal

In Hitchens' 2010 essay in Vanity Fair about Gore Vidal's later writings, he also criticises Ahmed, who Vidal drew on for his 9/11 essay in The Observer. Hitchens wrote: "Mr. Ahmed on inspection proved to be a risible individual wedded to half-baked conspiracy-mongering, his 'Institute' a one-room sideshow in the English seaside town of Brighton, and his publisher an outfit called 'Media Monitors Network' in association with 'Tree of Life,' whose now-deceased Web site used to offer advice on the ever awkward question of self-publishing."

Ahmed responded with a letter to the editor, published by Vanity Fair, asserting that Hitchens's article contained "major inaccuracies": "Hitchens’s reduction of me to 'conspiracy-mongering' and as having a 'one-room sideshow' institute is contrasted by the fact that I’m an academic at the University of Sussex; my book, The War on Freedom, was used by the 9/11 commission; I’ve testified before the U.S. Congress; I’ve given evidence to a U.K. parliamentary inquiry; and my institute is advised by a board of 20 leading scholars. Hitchens also bizarrely targets my first publisher, which is not 'deceased' but is in fact a flourishing alternative news source." Hitchens offered a further reply in the magazine: "On reflection and on a rereading of his 'book,' I would change my original article and remove the word 'risible.' A more apposite term for both the author and his illiterate pages would be 'contemptible.'"

Ahmed followed up with a detailed critique of Hitchens' attack on both himself and Gore Vidal in a feature article published by The Independent on Sunday. He argued that:

the pre-9/11 intelligence failure was not simply because of a lack of reliable intelligence, or because intelligence bureaucracy was hopelessly incompetent (which it was and is), but ultimately because the Bush administration made political decisions that obstructed critical intelligence investigations and ongoing information-sharing that could have prevented 9/11. Those decisions were made to protect vested interests linked to US support of Islamist extremist networks like the Taliban and their state-sponsors, such as the Gulf kingdoms, rooted in Western oil dependency and intersecting financial investments. The inadequacy of the 9/11 Commission investigation, in this regard, is an open secret to many intelligence experts.

On the same day, The Independent on Sunday ran a news story on the whole episode, reporting that Ahmed "had not suggested there was a conspiracy [on 9/11], rather a 'dereliction of duty'", and that he had "used the word 'complicity' in a legal sense."

Nafeez Ahmed and Discover magazine

In 2014, Discover, an American general audience science magazine, published a blog article by Keith Kloor concerning Ahmed's Guardian article about a supposedly "NASA-sponsored" and funded study of the collapse of industrial civilisation. Kloor objected to the lack of independent responses to the paper, yet to be published at the time, from other scholars in the field. A second post on the study by Kloor detailed serious reservations by specialists on the collapse study leading to an assertion that Ahmed had made an "uncritical appraisal". The story was reported internationally by other media outlets, but Ahmed's claims about NASA were officially rejected. In a statement, NASA commented that the collapse study "was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA. It is an independent study by the university researchers utilizing research tools developed for a separate NASA activity. As is the case with all independent research, the views and conclusions in the paper are those of the authors alone. NASA does not endorse the paper or its conclusions."

Ahmed disputed the claim that NASA funding had not supported the study by quoting its notice to that effect, and asserted that the paper's authors backed his earlier comments.

Discover has labelled Ahmed as a "doomer." A December 2013 blog post by Kloor asserts: "Once someone starts down this civilization-is-collapsing road, like Guardian blogger Nafeez Ahmed, it’s hard to stop. If you want a tour guide to the apocalypse, Ahmed is your guy." A March 2014 blog post says: "Like the most warped fundamentalists who exploit tragedy, the merchants of eco-doom also cynically seize on current events. On this score, nobody rivals Nafeez Ahmed (the UK Left’s faux-scholarly equivalent to Glenn Beck), who has an unquenchable appetite for peak-everything porn."

Ahmed rejected the characterisation of his work as being marked by "doom" following his first post on the collapse study. In March 2014, he wrote in his Guardian blog: "Rather what we are seeing ... are escalating, interconnected symptoms of the unsustainability of the global system in its current form. While the available evidence suggests that business-as-usual is likely to guarantee worst-case scenarios, simultaneously humanity faces an unprecedented opportunity to create a civilisational form that is in harmony with our environment, and ourselves."

Academic articles