There are few milestones in a lifetime that everyone can have a collective experience of —an event, a moment that is seared in memory, that transfixes us and redefines our sense of the world around us.
Everyone in the world—or most everyone with a television—ten years ago, on September 11, 2001, would remember what he or she was doing when the Twin Towers in New York imploded and disintegrated into ash and twisted metal. It was a moment of universal shock and disbelief, a surreal realization that terror could strike anywhere, even in the financial epicenter of a superpower. The imagery was horrendously stunning, staggering in the magnitude of damage and mayhem as two of the tallest skyscrapers in the world were reduced in a matter of hours to massive heaps of rubble and an instant graveyard of three thousand lives.
I remember watching the breaking news on CNN with my wife after a late dinner. We were twelve time zones away from the US East Coast, so as terror struck New York on the morning of that fateful day, we were preparing to retire for the night. For several minutes the billowing clouds of black smoke that enveloped what were New York’s famous landmarks appeared like part of a bizarre movie. When the second World Trade tower fell I realized in horror that the world was cruelly, irreversibly turned upside down that day.
In the next days and weeks there was near-universal expressions of sympathy for America, which had for the first time in its history been attacked on its own mainland soil. The last such attack was at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in 1941, which pushed the USA to a world war between fascism and freedom. This time, 60 years since the Japanese bombing of the American military fleet in Hawaii, the United States was going to enter into a state of siege and a state of war in an age of terrorism.
As America grieved and dealt with its sudden vulnerability, it moved to consolidate its own power and global reach. Over the next two years since 9/11, America waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq, costing the country trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. Afghanistan, seen as the lair of Al Qaeda and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, became the theater of a “bleeding war” for America. It was Bin Laden’s intent to draw the United States into a quagmire in Afghanistan, similar to how the Soviet Union was squeezed dry in the 1980s with America then as an ally (of the Mujaheedin, the forerunners of the present-day Taliban) and victim.
When President George W. Bush ordered the occupation of Iraq in 2003, insisting that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had links with Al Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction, America was led to another perilous swamp of violence and war. As scholar Bruce Riedel points out, America’s occupation of Iraq played into the hands of Al Qaeda as Bin Laden’s protégé, Abu Musaib Zarqawi, turned it into an untenable, protracted civil war.
Today President Barack Obama, elected in 2008 in part with the bold agenda to end the war in Iraq, is hard put to extricate America from the two wars and ensure that this does not further engender terror, chaos and societal disintegration in both countries. And what began in the wake of 9/11 as global sympathy for America turned into worldwide opposition to the “imperial overreach” of two wars and the killing of thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire. The United States under a more belligerent Bush administration had, after all, overturned United Nations’ Resolutions and bitter European Union resistance against waging war in Iraq.
The US 9/11 Commission Report noted that it only took over half a million dollars for the Al Qaeda to plan and carry out the 9/11 attack. But as Riedel says, property damage in New York and Washington, DC cost over a $100 billion with a cumulative cost to the global economy in the estimate of two trillion dollars. The two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are said to have cost over $4 trillion. In this light, 9/11 was “not only traumatic, but a cheap investment that cost America dearly in lives and treasure.”
As we look back at a decade since 9/11, we remind ourselves of the profound and far-reaching impact the attacks have had not only in America but the rest of the world. The national security infrastructure of the United States had been transformed overnight and altogether new bureaucracies were established, like the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center. Everywhere we go, especially in airports, we live with the reality of stringent security checks.
Today even with the recent capture and death of Bin Laden, we are no closer to bridging divides between the so-called West and the Arab world, as new fronts of terror open up in as seemingly disparate places as Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines (Mindanao). Al Qaeda’s reach is no doubt global. And one of the enduring challenges of our globalized world is the post-9/11 reality of ending what has become an interminable conflict between organized states and cryptic non-state actors or groups that do not hesitate to use terror to forward their deadly, scorched-earth aims.
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