This is the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world.<\/p>\n
The impact of the attacks is not in doubt. Just keeping to western and central Asia: Afghanistan is barely surviving, Iraq has been devastated and Pakistan is edging closer to a disaster that could be catastrophic.<\/p>\n
On May 1, 2011, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan. The most immediate significant consequences have also occurred in Pakistan. There has been much discussion of Washington\u2019s anger that Pakistan didn\u2019t turn over bin Laden. Less has been said about the fury among Pakistanis that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor had already intensified in Pakistan, and these events have stoked it further.<\/p>\n
One of the leading specialists on Pakistan, British military historian Anatol Lieven, wrote in The National Interest in February that the war in Afghanistan is \u201cdestabilizing and radicalizing Pakistan, risking a geopolitical catastrophe for the United States \u2013 and the world \u2013 which would dwarf anything that could possibly occur in Afghanistan.\u201d<\/p>\n
At every level of society, Lieven writes, Pakistanis overwhelmingly sympathize with the Afghan Taliban, not because they like them but because \u201cthe Taliban are seen as a legitimate force of resistance against an alien occupation of the country,\u201d much as the Afghan mujahedeen were perceived when they resisted the Russian occupation in the 1980s.<\/p>\n
These feelings are shared by Pakistan\u2019s military leaders, who bitterly resent U.S. pressures to sacrifice themselves in Washington\u2019s war against the Taliban. Further bitterness comes from the terror attacks (drone warfare) by the U.S. within Pakistan, the frequency of which was sharply accelerated by President Obama; and from U.S. demands that the Pakistani army carry Washington\u2019s war into tribal areas of Pakistan that had been pretty much left on their own, even under British rule.<\/p>\n
The military is the stable institution in Pakistan, holding the country together. U.S. actions might \u201cprovoke a mutiny of parts of the military,\u201d Lieven writes, in which case \u201cthe Pakistani state would collapse very quickly indeed, with all the disasters that this would entail.\u201d<\/p>\n
The potential disasters are drastically heightened by Pakistan\u2019s huge, rapidly growing nuclear weapons arsenal, and by the country\u2019s substantial jihadi movement.<\/p>\n
Both of these are legacies of the Reagan administration. Reagan officials pretended they did not know that Zia ul-Haq, the most vicious of Pakistan\u2019s military dictators and a Washington favorite, was developing nuclear weapons and carrying out a program of radical Islamization of Pakistan with Saudi funding.<\/p>\n
The catastrophe lurking in the background is that these two legacies might combine, with fissile materials leaking into the hands of jihadis. Thus we might see nuclear weapons, most likely \u201cdirty bombs,\u201d exploding in London and New York.<\/p>\n
Lieven summarizes: \u201cU.S. and British soldiers are in effect dying in Afghanistan in order to make the world more dangerous for American and British peoples.\u201d<\/p>\n
Surely Washington understands that U.S. operations in what has been christened \u201cAfpak\u201d \u2013 Afghanistan-Pakistan \u2013 might destabilize and radicalize Pakistan.<\/p>\n
The most significant WikiLeaks documents to have been released so far are the cables from U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad, who supports U.S. actions in Afpak but warns that they \u201crisk destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis in Pakistan \u00e2(euro) .125.\u201d<\/p>\n
Patterson writes of the possibility that \u201csomeone working in (Pakistani government) facilities could gradually smuggle enough fissile material out to eventually make a weapon,\u201d a danger enhanced by \u201cthe vulnerability of weapons in transit.\u201d<\/p>\n
A number of analysts have observed that bin Laden won some major successes in his war against the United States.<\/p>\n
As Eric S. Margolis writes in The American Conservative in May, \u201c(bin Laden) repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them.\u201d<\/p>\n
That Washington seemed bent on fulfilling bin Laden\u2019s wishes was evident immediately after the 9\/11 attacks.<\/p>\n
In his 2004 book \u201cImperial Hubris,\u201d Michael Scheuer, a senior CIA analyst who had tracked Osama bin Laden since 1996, explains: \u201cBin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. (He) is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world,\u201d and largely achieved his goal.<\/p>\n
He continues: \u201cU.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden\u2019s only indispensable ally.\u201d And arguably remains so, even after his death.<\/p>\n
The succession of horrors across the past decade leads to the question: Was there an alternative to the West\u2019s response to the 9\/11 attacks?<\/p>\n
The jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9\/11, if the \u201ccrime against humanity,\u201d as the attacks were rightly called, had been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even considered in the rush to war. It is worth adding that bin Laden was condemned in much of the Arab world for his part in the attacks.<\/p>\n
By the time of his death, bin Laden had long been a fading presence, and in the previous months was eclipsed by the Arab Spring. His significance in the Arab world is captured by the headline in a New York Times article by Middle East specialist Gilles Kepel: \u201cBin Laden Was Dead Already.\u201d<\/p>\n
That headline might have been dated far earlier, had the U.S. not mobilized the jihadi movement with retaliatory attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq.
\nWithin the jihadi movement, bin Laden was doubtless a venerated symbol but apparently didn\u2019t play much more of a role for al-Qaida, this \u201cnetwork of networks,\u201d as analysts call it, which undertake mostly independent operations.<\/p>\n
Even the most obvious and elementary facts about the decade lead to bleak reflections when we consider 9\/11 and its consequences, and what they portend for the future. Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific communities as one of the fathers of modern linguistics and a major figure of analytic philosophy. Chomsky is the author of more than 150 books and has received worldwide attention for his views.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n_________________________<\/em><\/p>\n