A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  ‘US aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan was based on falsified intelligence,’ he says. ‘And US involvement is creating security problems in the Muslim countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq . . . The United States has destabilized the peace of the whole world.’

  The failure of Pakistani authorities to restore law and order along the country’s north-west border, together with repeated US airstrikes, feeds this notion.

  ‘People are asking why their homes were destroyed by the US forces,’ says Rahat. ‘Innocent people are being tortured and killed. The whole region is in the grip of violence and uncertainty. What type of peace is this?’ The cleric becomes animated. ‘What is the US doing here? Apart from killing people in drone attacks, I mean . . . The War on Terror is in fact a war against Muslims and Islam.’

  To Rahat’s list of allegations, we might add a few more: that Western leaders seized on 9/11 as an opportunity to justify policies they already had in mind, fabricated excuses to sell those policies to their citizens, then ended up falling for their own propaganda. That the United States, a nation so consumed with rage in the aftermath of 9/11 that its own citizens murdered people who simply looked as if they might be Muslims, obeyed the laws it wanted to obey, reinterpreted the laws it did not want to obey and stepped outside the laws it was unable to reinterpret. That it embraced dictators it thought useful, ignored their atrocious human rights records, then abandoned them if they didn’t co-operate. That coalition troops fought cowardly campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, preferring to drop bombs from the air rather than engaging the enemy on the ground, then lying about the numbers of women and children they killed. That a war declared in the name of human rights, democracy and freedom subverted those very rights and ended up achieving the exact opposite of its stated goals. That the corrosion of international law, international humanitarian law and the laws of war was as irreversible as it was contagious. That wherever the US flag went there was death. That the politicians lied, and lied, and lied.

  It doesn’t really matter whether you believe these statements or not. What does matter is that a huge percentage of people in the Arab world believe them.

  ‘If you are conducting military operations in Pakistan and displacing people from their homes,’ says Rahat, ‘how can you convince them to use this vaccine? These policies affect the anti-polio campaign.’ He sighs. ‘People I talk to about this say that the only vaccine they really want is peace.’

  Ultimately, vaccine uptake is dependent on trust: in the safety of the vaccine itself and in the people who administer it. Once that trust is lost, it doesn’t matter how effective the vaccine or how noble the goal of its administration. If the motives and conduct of the administrators are questionable, why would anyone trust them with the physical welfare of their children?

  ‘It was different before 9/11,’ says Hazrat Jamal from his home in Bajaur. ‘People used to be co-operative. We would have people come to us and say, “Hey, you missed our village, you missed our children.” But after 9/11 and the US invasion of Afghanistan, we are facing all kinds of problems. We might not succeed. People don’t trust America. They don’t trust anything that comes from America.’

  Trust has to be earned. Once lost, it is hard to regain. How to go about doing this – and how long it might take – is anyone’s guess.

  In the meantime, the virus spreads. Among the poorest, most dissatisfied nations on earth, where life is apparently cheap, education is lacking and word of mouth is strong. In the dark backrooms of tea houses and shops, in mosques and Internet chatrooms and at prayer meetings. Where there is poverty, illiteracy, discrimination, lack of governance, discontent, deprivation, corruption and injustice. The virus may be cornered, but it’s hiding in some of the most destitute, poorly governed and war-torn countries on the planet.

  That our children have been immunized does not place them beyond risk: globalization works both ways.

  On 2 July 2007, Thai Air flight TG999 touched down at Tullamarine Airport, Melbourne. One of its passengers was a foreign-exchange student. A week earlier, at home in Pakistan, he had picked up a dose of what he thought was influenza. It wasn’t.

  He wasn’t an ‘illegal’. He wasn’t a queue-jumper. He didn’t come by boat. He wasn’t a terrorist. He had a visa. Everything was above board.

  One unvaccinated student turned out to be Australia’s first polio case in twenty-one years.

  The virus only has to be lucky once. We have to be lucky always.

  Epilogue

  Polunsky inmate #999409 tries to struggle, but it’s no use. He is strapped to a gurney and wheeled in to the chamber. The gurney tilts upright. His arms extend to receive the needles, like a crucifix. He starts to fall.

  Stroman dreams a lot, has done since he arrived on Death Row. At night, old friends visit him to talk. Not necessarily about his crimes, but about things that happened long ago: his grandfather, a friend who committed suicide, another who died in a bike crash. It’s not spooky, talking with ghosts. It’s kind of nice. Friendly. But he doesn’t like the gurney dream.

  Stroman’s not afraid of death. What scares him is the procedure. Like 9/11: it wasn’t the planes, the collapsing buildings or the extent of the carnage that horrified him. It was the process of death, the suffering on the way there. He doesn’t like the idea of a fatal injection. He’d rather be shot. Quicker. More Texan.

  Through the glass I ask him about his grandfather, Robert. ‘What would he say to you if he was alive today?’

  He smiles and shakes his head. ‘He’d knock the living shit out of me.’

  Stroman is about to become a grandfather himself. One of his daughters is pregnant. The baby, a girl, will be named Madyson. He’s excited, loves children.

  ‘Never thought I’d live to see the day,’ he says.

  * * *

  On 11 September 2001, a fanatical terrorist organization, al-Qaeda, struck the United States. Three thousand civilians were killed. Western leaders faced a series of impossible decisions: the scale of the attacks was unprecedented. How should we respond? What should we hope to achieve? The answers were unclear.

  Today, things are clearer. We have achieved a very great deal. A decade after 9/11, hundreds of thousands more civilians are dead. Iran and North Korea – two of the four nations constituting the ‘Axis of Evil’ – are either going or have already gone nuclear. The United Nations and NATO have been weakened. International law, the mechanism by which states regulate themselves and each other, is in jeopardy

  Financially, too, the outlook is dire. Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for economics, estimates that Iraq alone will end up costing the United States somewhere in the region of $3 trillion; the rest of the world will end up having to fork out another $3 trillion. After a global financial meltdown, $6 trillion is an outlay we can ill afford.

  There are more significant costs. Over the course of the last seven years, the West has proved unable to impose its will on Iraq, a nation with a population a tenth that of the United States. Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most broken states on the planet, appears equally uncontrollable. These two countries were supposed to be the gateways to a new democracy in the Middle East. They may instead prove to be the Vietnams of our generation.

  The result has been a crisis of legitimacy. 9/11 brought us together. A decade on, not only is the United States the most reviled nation on earth, but a third of its own citizens believe their government to have been complicit in the bombing of the World Trade Centers.

  ‘Make no mistake about it,’ George W. Bush told the American people the day after the attacks. ‘We will win.’

  We haven’t. The world is not less, but more, dangerous.

  It’s one thing to launch a war with certain goals and not to attain those goals. It’s another entirely to declare war and achieve the exact opposite of your stated intentions. If there is anything worse than losing a war, surely this is it?

  I meet Alka Patel at the gas station on Big To
wn Boulevard in Dallas. I want to buy her lunch, but she’s too busy to take time off, so we stand by the coffee machine in front of the counter where her husband was gunned down in 2001 and make polite conversation. Her son has just won a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Texas at Austin. Her daughter wants to be a doctor, too. She’ll get there: she works hard, makes good grades. Her father would have been proud.

  I’m apprehensive. I have a deep aversion to the school of journalism that advocates doorstepping the bereaved to ask them how they feel. Inevitably, that’s pretty much what I end up doing. What was Vasudev like? I ask.

  Alka thinks for a moment. ‘Quiet, pretty quiet, and very generous, and, um . . .’ Her voice starts to crack. She takes a breath and tries again. ‘Very generous . . . very quiet . . . and . . .’ She breaks down. ‘Sorry,’ she says.

  Nine thousand miles away in Melbourne, Australia, Halima al Saadi fixes lunch. ‘You know,’ whispers Karim the moment his wife is out of earshot, ‘some people are crazy after four years on Nauru. They eat tablets [anti-depressants] because of their time there. Our friend S. is completely insane: the police put him in prison because he was walking around with no clothes on.’

  Halima, eavesdropping from the kitchen, pipes up. ‘Some women are not able to rest,’ she says. ‘Bad dreams in the night.’

  Karim becomes indignant. ‘Why did they say we threw our children into the sea? That is not true. Not true. A lie.’

  That autumn a group of Uzbek politicians organizes a conference in Belgium. A government-in-exile, of sorts, is formed. The timing is auspicious. For four years, refugees have kept quiet about the Andijan massacre, but on 27 October 2009 the European Union votes to lift sanctions on Uzbekistan. Word is that the move is backed by the United States. The situation in Afghanistan is desperate: America wants back into the K2 airbase. This time, according to experts, things will go better. President Karimov, it seems, is coming back into the fold.

  The Uzbeks march outside the EU headquarters in Brussels to protest the resumption of arms trading with one of the world’s worst human rights abusers. Only one international broadcaster shows up to cover the issue.

  Much of the blame for the failure of the War on Terror lies with the calamitous decision to invade Iraq. Colin Powell, who appears to have been cajoled – and occasionally actively misled – in the run-up to the campaign, was one of a handful of policymakers willing to be upfront about what went wrong. The lack of weapons of mass destruction, he admitted in February 2004, changed the ‘political calculus’ when it came to the invasion: a cipher, presumably, for the fact that he would not have backed the operation had he known the truth. He was in a minority.

  As it became clear there were no WMDs in the country, politicians’ reasoning subtly shifted. ‘Saddam had WMDs’, the main argument for the invasion, became ‘Saddam had WMD programmes’, which then became ‘Saddam had WMD-related programmes’, then ‘Saddam had WMD-related programme activities’.

  Finally, hell, we invaded for other reasons: Saddam was a homicidal dictator who killed civilians. That the coalition of the willing ended up killing more was never mentioned.16

  Others were less nuanced. ‘I still firmly believe,’ wrote General Michael DeLong in October 2006, ‘that Iraq had WMDs and that one day they will be found.’ According to DeLong, formerly Deputy Commander at US CENTCOM, the weapons were smuggled to Lebanon and Syria, then hidden.

  In the face of such reasoning, one can only conclude that those responsible for the invasion are trapped in a desperate state of denial. Surely they must be aware that the invasion was a failure on a gargantuan scale – that it will go down as one of the worst foreign policy decisions of modern times? Apparently not.

  ‘I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong,’ Tony Blair told the Labour Party in 2004. ‘But I can’t, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam.’

  Cheerleaders for the invasion look to the future, waiting for the day when their decisions will be vindicated and they will be thanked rather than vilified.

  In the meantime, allies that rushed to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States after 9/11 scheme to remove their troops from harm’s way, to disentangle themselves from policies they backed wholeheartedly a few short years ago. Every week, news reports: car bombs, IEDs, ambushes. The bodies come home in bags.

  Were we lied to? I’m not certain that we were. To me, it wasn’t that the politicians lied more frequently, or that their lies were any grander. It was rather that the truth became inconveniently complex, tangled up with other issues. What we knew. What we believed. What our intelligence agencies promised us. What we told our intelligence agencies to promise us. What was acceptable. What was necessary. The issue was not one of dishonesty, but of something far more corrosive: certainty.

  Shocked by 11 September, policymakers called for ‘moral clarity’, but displayed none themselves, instead playing to the cheap seats, appealing to patriotism and to God, while concocting misguided similes linking 9/11 to Pearl Harbor and Bin Laden to Hitler. Mixing their metaphors to fit their audience, they yoked together simultaneously best – and worst-case scenarios to justify policies they had always fancied anyway.

  Stuck in a morass of half-baked assumptions and quasi-religious rhetoric, good intentions and misguided concepts of moral rectitude, truth quietly suffocated. Propelled by faith in our cause, our reason superseded by certainty, we didn’t even notice.

  We never follow up our al-Qaeda contact in Baghdad. Making contact with Tanzhim may well be a journalistic coup, but it’s not the story we’re after. It’s also a good way for all of us to end up on the Internet with masked men chanting Islamic slogans behind us. Abu Shujaa, the bomber, remains in hiding in Syria; Yusuf the looter who stole much of the HMX from Al Qa’qaa’s bunkers, breaks off contact. One of our fixers receives death threats, along with assurances that everything he was shown in Yusifiyah has now been moved. Somewhere, in a potato cellar forty-five minutes south-west of Baghdad, ten tons of crystalline high explosive awaits a purchaser.

  A couple of months later, in the village of Deh Rawood, Afghanistan, Abdul Malik receives a visit from an American called Bob, who shows him a photograph. This is the woman, he says, who launched the AC-130 attack on his family. Bob asks if Malik can forgive her.

  ‘No,’ he replies. ‘Go and kill her in America.’ Informed that it’s not possible to murder people in the United States, even for revenge, Malik instructs Bob to get out. ‘If you can’t do this for me,’ he tells him, ‘we are not friends.’

  Malik and Tela Gul still live in the same house. In the afternoons, their two children, Gul Samara and Farid Ahmed, play in the orchard behind the building where, ten years ago, Malik’s brother fired his AK-47 to celebrate their engagement. Neither child has ever been told why they have no grandparents. Neither is aware of the fact that their ancestors’ remains are all around them, entwined in the branches of the pomegranate trees that reach up towards the sky.

  * * *

  Outspoken liberals like to display their hatred of the lead players behind the War on Terror. Bush, Cheney Rumsfeld, Blair: the villains of the piece. The truth is that, with a few notable exceptions, nobody covered themselves with glory. Opposition political parties failed to intervene; the military failed to stand behind its beliefs that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan required better resourcing, manpower and planning; the intelligence community failed to insist that caveats in its products were there for a reason. The media failed to inform the public there were serious problems. Perhaps the blame should be shared? There’s enough to go round.

  Doubtless there is a case to be made that the world changed as a result of 9/11. But how it changed was not up to Bin Laden, al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It was up to us. We could have reacted differently. We didn’t.

  As a result, the situation in which we currently find ourselves is not one that has been thrust upon us. It’s one that we have chosen. Al-Qaeda doesn’t threat
en our existence. It never did. Our reaction to it just might.

  Polunsky operates a macabre lottery system. Inmates are allocated numbers on arrival; the higher the number, the longer the wait. Five of the next ten scheduled executions will be of prisoners with numbers greater than Stroman’s. Time has almost overtaken him. When it does, #999409 will stop sending me letters plastered with US flags. When it does, the story will be complete: two wives will have been widowed, six children orphaned.

  Vasudev Patel was right. ‘Whatever revenge they have with each other,’ he told Alka on the night of 9/11, ‘they’re just going to kill innocent people.’

  I meet Kevin ‘Bear’ Hartline at his home in Mesquite. We sit on a battered sofa in his garage drinking beer and reminiscing about Stroman. Bear has stuck by his friend since they first met at school in the 1980s; there’s every chance he will be beside him at the end.

  It’s an uncomfortable meeting. The more Bear drinks, the more despondent he becomes. He looks at his feet and shuffles uncomfortably; at times I wonder if he’s about to cry.

  ‘You know,’ he muses, ‘I’m probably the only person in the world that really gives a damn about that guy. We couldn’t have been closer if we were brothers.’ It’s hot. Outside, the tarmac is melting; above us, a US flag hangs limp. ‘I love him. I really do,’ he says. ‘But I’m just so, so ashamed of what he did.’

  Who knows? Perhaps, in the small dark hours of the night, when he’s not conversing with ghosts, Stroman is, too.

  Suggested Reading

  Allawi, Alia A., The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (Yale University Press, 2007)

  Anonymous Hunting Al Qaeda: A Take-No-Prisoners Account of Terror, Adventure, and Disillusionment (Zenith Press, 2005)

  Bamford James, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies (Anchor Books, 2005)