Does one claim with surprise how it has already been ten years or does one note with greater surprise that it has only been ten years? Has a whole decade crept up quickly upon us before we even knew it or has it been a painfully slow ten years?
Both answers would be correct. Recent history, they say, is to be divided into two parts: before and after. September 11th is to be that graduating mark to time everything else by. Not many could have imagined how quickly certain set-in-stone policies had changed. In a near Orwellian fashion, the Taliban regime was to be the enemy now; in fact, we were always at war with Oceania. The Americans who had funded the militant extremists and financed the planting of their dragon’s teeth across the breadth and expanse of the land were now interesting in clamping down on them. First, sloppily and ruthlessly (like suffocating the shipping containers full of surrendering Taliban fighters in the initial aftermath of their regime’s fall) then sloppily and wastefully (like buying off a series of war lords in Afghanistan and sinking cashloads into them, rather than spending on the beleaguered Afghans) and then sloppily and uncertainly (like being ready to talk to anyone and everyone as long as it facilitates an exit strategy.)
The incident of September 11th, which took the lives of close to 3000 innocent people, also spawned two wars in another part of the world, yielding casualties many times over that number. One was in Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s request for a trial in a “neutral country” was spurned. The other was in Iraq, a country not involved, by any stretch of the imagination, in the incident.
In Pakistan, those of us who claim the incident has made our lives less safe are correct but only just. If they mean this to imply that the US response, and our subsequent involvement in the war against terror, is the only thing that has wrought more terror upon ourselves, they haven’t covered the whole gamut of factors. Our very social fabric had started being corroded ever since the ZAB regime, when Islamists were enlisted to keep the communists in Afghanistan at bay. This approach intensified in the Zia-ul-Haq regime and gave us the networks that plague us till this very day. September 11th or not, we were to see religious violence sooner or later. This is our war.
