50 9/11 and after

Tuesday September 11, 2001 dawned clear and sunny in New York. It was a beautiful late summer morning. Then, as commuters arrived at their offices, reports began to circulate that a plane had accidentally struck one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. As thousands of onlookers stared at the smoke billowing out of the North Tower, they were astonished to see another plane—a large airliner—fly out of a clear blue sky straight at the South Tower and crash into it with a great burst of flames.

It was just fifteen minutes after the first hit at 8:46, and it was immediately clear that this was no accident. At 9:40 a third plane hit the Pentagon, the Department of Defense headquarters in Washington, DC, and within the hour a fourth plane had crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside. The passengers, finding the plane taken over by hijackers and hearing of events in New York and Washington on their mobile phones, had rushed their captors, in the almost certain knowledge that it would cost them their lives.

In all 2,750 were killed in the Twin Towers. A further 184 died at the Pentagon, and forty in Pennsylvania. All nineteen of the hijackers, most of them from Saudi Arabia, were also killed. It was the worst ever attack on mainland America, and it was to change the world forever.

From East Africa to Afghanistan It soon became clear that the hijackers were associated with al-Qaeda, a hitherto shady Islamist terrorist group headed by a Saudi millionaire called Osama bin Laden. In the 1980s bin Laden had joined the US-backedmujahedeenfighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, but by February 1998 he was enjoining Muslims to “kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military … in any country in which it is possible to do it.” In August of that year, al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing over 300 people. Bin Laden, as well as condemning America for its support of Israel, was particularly incensed by the presence of US forces on the soil of Saudi Arabia—the home of Islam’s most sacred sites, in Medina and Mecca. US forces had been stationed in Saudi Arabia since the 1991 Gulf War, to deter any further aggression by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, whose occupation of Kuwait had been forcibly ended by a US-led coalition.

“The Americans love Pepsi Cola, but we love death.”

Placard displayed by an Afghan man in Pakistan, September 2001

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, some Americans were prompted to ask why they should be so hated in parts of the Muslim world, but many others enthusiastically backed Bush’s call for a “war on terror,” launched in an address to Congress on September 20. This “war on terror,” designed to defend the Western values of liberty and democracy, ironically involved a disregard for human rights, as those suspected of terrorist involvement around the world were subjected to detention without trial and even torture.

Al-Qaeda’s training camps were in Afghanistan, which had been controlled by the Muslim fundamentalist Taliban since 1996. In October 2001 the USA, at the head of a NATO coalition, began airstrikes against Afghanistan with the aim of destroying al-Qaeda bases, and in the following ground campaign ousted the Taliban from power. Bin Laden, together with most of the al-Qaeda leadership, escaped, probably into the lawless region along Pakistan’s northwest frontier. Although a pro-Western democratic government was installed in Kabul, it has proved to be endemically corrupt, and unable to extend its power over much of the country. This, together with traditional tribal divisions and dislike of foreign occupiers, and an initial failure by the West to supply much-needed development aid, has led to a strong Taliban insurgency, tying down large numbers of NATO troops.

Debacle in Iraq The 1991 Gulf War had left Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq, a somewhat artificial country created by the British at the end of the First World War out of a part of the former Ottoman empire. There were Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south, an uneasy cohabitation that Saddam had kept together through ruthless oppression—even using chemical weapons against his own citizens. As well as poison gas, Saddam was suspected of acquiring other weapons of mass destruction (WMD), such as biological and even nuclear weapons, in defiance of UN resolutions. He was also increasingly thwarting the efforts of UN inspectors sent to ensure that he held no WMD.

Assessing the threats

The actions of the USA and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan do not appear to have diminished the terrorist threat, as bombings in Bali, Spain, London, Kampala and elsewhere attest. Indeed, the invasion of Muslim countries by Western “crusaders” may actually have increased recruitment to the cause of violent global jihad. This has replaced Cold War nuclear annihilation as the main existential threat in the minds of many in the West, even though much informed opinion holds that climate change presents a far greater risk to global security.

It may never be possible to eliminate entirely the death-loving fervor of Islamist terrorism—suppress one cell, another grows up somewhere else; destroy training camps in one failed state, another failed state opens its doors to the terrorists; knock out the leadership, imitators will arise around the world. A security strategy based on containment and intelligence may prove the best way forward, combined with a determination to address—politically and economically—the causes that lead so many to embrace or sympathize with terrorism.

After 9/11 the Bush administration began to suggest that Saddam was in league with al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups, and was likely to supply them with WMD, so threatening the West. In fact, Saddam was a secular Arab nationalist of the old school, and had dealt harshly with Islamists within Iraq. But Saddam nevertheless became the target of especial opprobrium by the neoconservatives within Bush’s administration, who believed that it was the mission of the USA to export freedom and democracy to the Third World, backed up if necessary by armed force. The fact that Iraq sat on huge oil reserves also made it strategically important. The consequence was that in March 2003 a “coalition of the willing,” primarily comprising the USA and the UK, mounted an invasion of Iraq and overthrew Saddam. There was no clear UN sanction for this action, which was undertaken in defiance of mass popular protests around the world. Not a single WMD—the sole justification for the UK’s involvement—was found.

“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

President George W. Bush, address to Congress, September 20, 2001

The invading powers had made insufficient plans for rebuilding Iraq after “regime change.” The ethnic and religious divisions within the country opened up, leading to civil strife and fierce resistance to the Western occupiers, together with the emergence of an al-Qaeda group in the country. During the invasion and the subsequent insurgency, the infrastructure of Iraq was badly damaged, and tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of Iraqi civilians were killed. Although the last US combat brigades withdrew in August 2010, Iraq remains a dangerously unstable place.

the condensed idea

The beginning of a new age of anxiety?