Six years wiser?

Six years after is as good a time as any to wonder, how did we get here and where do we go from here? The coming presidential campaign is forcing every candidate from the two major parties to address this question. There is no consensus among them or the larger American public. A sign of that debate are articles in the September 10 edition of two major national newspapers by senior political figures, one article urging the US to hang tough or risk massive instability in the region and the other asking for withdrawal of troops almost immediately.

There is no doubt that the fight against the Al-Qaeda is a global, possibly multi-generational struggle. The bomb attacks on innocent civilians in London, Bali, Mumbai, Madrid, even Islamabad and, on a much larger scale, the killing fields of Iraq testify to the global reach, adaptability and resourcefulness of the ‘enemy’. However, as the authors of the 9/11 commission wrote recently in the The Washington Post, “US foreign policy has not stemmed the rising tide of extremism in the Muslim world”. And, more damningly, that the US “face(s) a rising tide of radicalisation and rage in the Muslim world — a trend to which our own actions have contributed.” In effect, a dramatic unintended consequence of the US-led war in Iraq was to strengthen the terrorist menace by generating more terrorists by seemingly confirming the Al-Qaeda’s perverse notion of a ‘War on Islam’ by the US and other western countries and their regional ‘lackeys’. Meanwhile, the architects of the September 11 attacks — Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri — have managed to regroup their organisation in what appears to be a safe haven in the mountainous Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.

Unfortunately, the war in Iraq has grabbed popular imagination in the US and has distracted from the ongoing struggle in Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s tribal belt. While the Taliban’s much feared summer offensive in Afghanistan has failed to materialise, coalition casualties in Afghanistan may well be the highest since the overthrow of the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies in late 2001. According to recent expert reports, the Taliban insurgency has now spread to larger parts of rural south and south-eastern Afghanistan and there is stepped up movement of Taliban/Al-Qaeda fighters across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Clearly, there is insufficient force to deal with this growing danger. More importantly, coalition reliance on the use of massive airpower to defeat the insurgency risks alienating the Afghan people. On the sixth anniversary of 9/11, the US and its allies in the global war on terrorism need to re-dedicate themselves to prevent state failure in Afghanistan and, finally, to deny the Taliban and Al-Qaeda the safe haven they now enjoy. But the billions of dollars devoted to Iraqi reconstruction and security leave comparatively little for Afghanistan. Deployments to Iraq create similar shortages of military personnel for Afghanistan.

The tragic attacks on 9/11 have, however, had several unintended — and beneficial — effects in US academic circles. Ordinary Americans, whose insularity is legend, have become more aware of global issues than ever before and there is growing demand for knowing what is ‘out there’. The shocked ‘why do they hate us?’ attitude has been replaced by a growing demand to know more about the world outside our borders. This is also apparent in a policy decision to invest resources in language programmes and in the spread of area studies and ‘critical’ foreign languages in American universities. Not surprisingly, the ‘troubled-spots’ of the world in the Middle East and South Asia are attracting the most attention with increased faculty hiring, enhanced student enrollment and a surge in foreign language studies. The number of Arab instructors in the US, for example, has increased more than six-fold since 9/11. This increased attention is an investment in the next generation of US policymakers who would, then, be better prepared to handle future challenges. A consistent complaint of senior officials dealing with the threat of terrorism, such as former CIA director George Tenet in his recent book focusing on 9/11 and the move into Iraq, has been the lack of regional expertise and language competence.

The 2008 presidential elections will surely witness a selective and controlled use of 9/11 by both Republican and Democratic candidates. Rudy Giuliani, the then-mayor of New York, and a leading Republican candidate for president has already warned of ‘more losses’ on the terrorist front if the Democrats win the next elections. Democratic candidates, on the other hand, accuse him — and other Republicans — of exploiting 9/11 for domestic political purposes. Few prospective Democratic candidates go as far as Governor Bill Richardson of the state of New Mexico in his call for starting an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

As the presidential campaign builds to its crescendo next year, the politicisation of the Iraq venture and its aftermath is sure to continue. But we are yet to hear any coherent strategy of how to deal with terrorism from either side of the Iraq issue. Unfortunately, the commemoration of 9/11 has prompted no such debate.

The writer is associate director of South Asia Studies at Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC