The Double Tragedy

BOSTON -- The United States has been remembering and commemorating the tenth anniversary of the trauma and native heroism that marked the events of Sept. 11, 2001 for most Americans. The remembrances have been emotionally powerful, but they are also politically incomplete. Americans rightly emphasize the grave wound and incomprehensible crime that were inflicted on them, and also celebrate American resilience in the face of both. But the tragedy and suffering of the initial criminality have simply been perpetuated by the inability, or unwillingness, of American society to adequately explore why this happened to them -- because Americans for the most part still fail to address the wider context of the world in which dwell both the criminal attacker and the innocent victims.

Grasping the totality of what happened that day a decade ago is a monumentally difficult deed -- transcending one’s own hurt in order also to assess the wider arena in which the Al-Qaeda terrorists were born, grew and ultimately attacked the United States. When the U.S. did transcend its own trauma and attempt to go beyond its borders to understand relevant global forces that led to the 9/11 attacks, it mistakenly focused largely on two dimensions that are mostly diversionary, and in many instances counter-productive. One is the militarism that has dominated the global reaction of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq; the other is the wildly exaggerated emphasis on Islam the religion and culture -- to understand it, to moderate it, to contain it -- instead of more appropriately focusing on the actions of a handful of box-cutter-wielding criminal Muslim individuals.

The missing important element in the public analysis and discussion of 9/11 that I have followed closely this week is that the terror of 9/11 did not emanate from a vacuum. It was part of a cycle of policies, attitudes and reactions by various actors in the Middle East that spawned this and other terrorist movements -- with terrorism against civilians being a relatively small part of the much, much wider and older cycle of political violence, aggression, occupation, resistance, subjugation and deep human degradation that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths in recent decades, and millions of displaced refugees. Because they isolated the terror against the United States and ignored this pivotal wider cycle, the responses to 9/11 in the U.S. and the Middle East have made things worse for all today in the U.S. and around the region and the world. A security-based militaristic reaction exacerbated rather than improved the underlying poor quality of governance and citizen rights that had contributed in the first place to the rise of domestic discontent and opposition to foreign occupation that led to the birth of Al-Qaeda and other movements like it.

The biggest policy failure in the response to 9/11 in the West and the Middle East was to misdiagnose the nature and context of Al-Qaeda. This was, in reality, a small fringe movement -- a violent, marginal cult on the run -- that consistently failed to resonate with publics across the Arab-Asian region, but that exploited widely held grievances against Arab and Asian governments and the foreign policies of the United States and Israel. Most significantly, the United States ignores the awkward central fact that Al-Qaeda and other such militants were largely incubated in the jails of Arab countries that were close allies of the United States, such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Egypt (i.e., the radicalization of Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Abu Mus’ab el-Zarqawi, among many others).

The security- and war-dominated, American-led over-reaction to 9/11 led to two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and increased political and technical support to Arab security services -- exactly the two phenomena that led to the birth and growth of Al-Qaeda in the first place. It is also critical to any useful analysis of Al-Qaeda terror to recall that a foreign military presence on “sacred” Islamic soil twice fuelled critical periods of Al-Qaeda’s birth and expansion: first when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan after 1979, and second when the United States remained in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Gulf war against Iraq. Sending American troops post-9/11 to invade and remain in Arab lands -- including Islamically-sacred Saudi soil -- was a sure-fire recipe for stoking the fires of resistance against foreign occupiers of Islamic realms that has always been the most successful recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda, which sees itself as defending Muslim lands and societies from corrupt and apostate Muslims or foreign predators.

In retrospect, the widespread American penchant to learn more about Islam after 9/11 was a touching, but irrelevant, reaction. Anyone who wanted to know why the terrorists attacked the United States would have been better off studying how young men transform psychologically from average adolescents to heartless criminals in the wider context of American and Soviet troop movements in the Middle East since 1979, and domestic Arab governance and security policies since the 1980s.

Predictably, the American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the increased local security measures in the Arab-Asian region after 9/11 resulted in several damaging trends. The most obvious were: They renewed intense opposition to Washington’s policies among publics in the region, which generated serious new tensions between antagonistic Arab publics and governments; they catalyzed a new generation of thousands of radical militants who fanned out from Iraq and Afghanistan to attack targets across the Arab-Asian region; they provided openings for extremists like Al-Qaeda affiliate Abu Mus’ab el-Zarqawi to sow Shiite-Sunni tensions in Iraq, which quickly spread to other parts of the region; they enhanced the harsh security policies of many Arab governments, which alienated their own disenchanted citizens, and delayed any transition to democratic rule and accountable good governance; they diverted resources to militarism that should have gone to socio-economic development; and, they distracted from the centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a leading and persistent source of discontent and radicalization among publics across the region.

Looking back, the decade since the 9/11 attack has seen some clear successes in disrupting terror networks through wars, arrests and covert actions, but more widely it has aggravated the underlying socio-economic, political and foreign military occupation conditions that stoked the growth of Al-Qaeda and other such groups in recent decades.