Source: InoSMI
9/11 + 10September 11, 2001, is one of those dates that will forever remain in contemporaries’ memories. Years later, people still clearly remember exactly where they were and what they were doing at the time. In Russian history, dates of this sort include the Nazi invasion on June 22, 1941; Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953; Yuri Gagarin’s space flight on April 12, 1961; and the coup attempt on August 19, 1991. In American history, one such date is November 22, 1963—when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. September 11, 2001, or 9/11, as the Americans call it, became a symbolic date not just for the United States, but for the entire world.
Globalization has reached such a scale now that people throughout the world—and not just the editors of the Paris newspaper Le Monde, as their famous headline stated—all were a bit American at that moment. The terrorists struck blows not only to the symbols of American financial and military might—the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington—but, as many thought at that time, threatened the whole of modern world civilization. Many people thought then that the fight against global terrorism, as a new absolute evil, could reunite humanity and force the big powers into laying aside their differences to form a united front against a common enemy, as they did during the war against Nazism.
The last decade has produced conflicting results. The threat turned out to be smaller than many people expected. Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations have carried out a number of serious attacks, leaving a trail of new victims from Bali to Beslan, London to Madrid, and Moscow to Mumbai—not to mention the countless blasts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. But they have not succeeded in shaking civilization’s foundations, nor in their specific goal of intimidating people in various countries and fomenting conflict between them and their various governments in order to enable the terrorists to carry out their own project of establishing an extremist caliphate. The organizers of the 9/11 attacks have succeeded in drawing the United States and its allies into a military and political struggle in the Muslim world, but with different results than those Osama bin Laden and his helpers hoped for.
It took the joint efforts of the Afghan Northern Alliance, the United States, and Russia just a few weeks to completely destroy the Taliban regime that had been sheltering al-Qaeda. For the first time since the Soviet army’s withdrawal, foreign forces appeared in Afghanistan—the Americans and their allies. Having shifted its strategic priorities to the Middle East, Washington then proceeded—acting on motivations only indirectly connected to the fight against international terrorism—to launch an offensive against Iraq, topple Saddam Hussein, and occupy the country. At one point it looked as if an American (and Israeli) attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities would be inevitable. With its ground forces present in the territory of a relatively large Muslim country and indirectly involved in the civil war unfolding in Iraq, Washington looked to have become hostage simultaneously to the Islamic extremists and American public opinion.
The extremists succeeded in “luring” America deep into the Muslim world, but not in beating it on their home ground. The United States eventually adjusted its strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, drawing up a calendar for transferring powers in both countries to the new governments there and abandoning the rhetoric of “regime change” in Iran. At the same time, they stepped up dramatically the counterterrorist operations against al-Qaeda on the Afghan-Pakistani border and in Pakistan itself, with the result that bin Laden was killed in one such operation on May 1, 2011. Attacks against the remaining terrorist leaders have not stopped since then. As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, al-Qaeda’s leadership has suffered virtually irreparable damage that has seriously weakened its capacity for action.
But at the same time, the international antiterrorist front never actually took shape. The United States concentrated on preparing to attack Iraq and lost interest in the alliance with Russia that President Vladimir Putin proposed in the immediate wake of 9/11. After Iraq became the main front in the “war on terror,” many U.S. allies, including Germany and France, started to distance themselves from events. Intelligence services in many countries organized practical counterterrorism cooperation, exchanging information and sometimes carrying out joint operations. But politically, each government was busy fighting its own terrorists, and did not always recognize others’ terrorists as such, whether in Lebanon, Uzbekistan, Gaza, Chechnya, Xinjiang, or Kashmir.
A decade later, terrorism still exists and still kills. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, operating in Yemen, is active and dangerous. Terrorism has not become the “organizational focus” for global international relations, but has had a big impact on them. American world hegemony reached its zenith when the U.S. military took control of Bagdad, but then began going into decline. Terrorism has not undermined the foundations of modern society, but it has had a visible impact on the public mood and legal norms. It has forced people in Europe and America to take a closer look at Islam, and has helped draw people in the Arab countries into the global processes. Terrorism emerged as a reaction to globalization, but in the end has helped to fuel its expansion.
Not everyone felt sympathy for al-Qaeda’s victims on September 11, 2001, however. Many in the Arab street considered bin Laden a hero and burned the American and Israeli flags. Ten years later, this same Arab street has indeed risen up against its own governments, not as members of al-Qaeda hoped after 9/11—to revive a medieval caliphate or “fight the Jews and crusaders”—but to resolve their specific social and economic problems. The Arab masses have stopped giving their attention to the traditional external enemies offered them; for many, democracy with Islamic characteristics presents an alternative to dictatorship and corruption. “Bin Laden the hero” died in the public’s minds even before the world’s most-wanted terrorist met his physical death. This is probably the biggest result of the last decade.