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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="CENTER"><font style="font-size:
13pt" size="3"><u><b>Was
War the Only Answer to 9/11?</b></u></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">This
is the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of Sept.
11,
2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">The
impact of the attacks is not in doubt. Just keeping to western
and
central Asia: <span style="font-style: normal"><b>Afghanistan
is
barely surviving, Iraq has been devastated, and Pakistan is
edging
closer to a disaster that could be catastrophic.</b></span></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">On
May 1, 2011, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin
Laden,
was assassinated in Pakistan. The most immediate significant
consequences have also occurred in Pakistan. There has been much
discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over
bin Laden. Less has been said about the fury among Pakistanis
that
the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political
assassination. Anti-American fervor had already intensified in
Pakistan, and these events have stoked it further.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">One
of the leading specialists on Pakistan, British military
historian
Anatol Lieven, wrote in <i>The National Interest</i> in
February that
the war in Afghanistan is “destabilizing and radicalizing
Pakistan,
risking a geopolitical catastrophe for the United States – and
the
world – which would dwarf anything that could possibly occur in
Afghanistan.”</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">At
every level of society, Lieven writes, Pakistanis overwhelmingly
sympathize with the Afghan Taliban, not because they like them
but
because “the Taliban are seen as a legitimate force of
resistance
against an alien occupation of the country,” much as the Afghan
mujahedeen were perceived when they resisted the Russian
occupation
in the 1980s.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">These
feelings are shared by Pakistan’s military leaders, who bitterly
resent U.S. pressures to sacrifice themselves in Washington’s
war
against the Taliban. Further bitterness comes from the terror
attacks
(drone warfare) by the U.S. within Pakistan, the frequency of
which
was sharply accelerated by President Obama; and from U.S.
demands
that the Pakistani army carry Washington’s war into tribal areas
of
Pakistan that had been pretty much left on their own, even under
British rule.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">The
military is the stable institution in Pakistan, holding the
country
together. U.S. actions might “provoke a mutiny of parts of the
military,” Lieven writes, in which case “the Pakistani state
would collapse very quickly indeed, with all the disasters that
this
would entail.”</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">The
potential disasters are drastically heightened by Pakistan’s
huge,
rapidly growing nuclear weapons arsenal, and by the country’s
substantial jihadi movement.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">Both
of these are legacies of the Reagan administration. Reagan
officials
pretended they did not know that Zia ul-Haq, the most vicious of
Pakistan’s military dictators and a Washington favorite, was
developing nuclear weapons and carrying out a program of radical
Islamization of Pakistan with Saudi funding.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">The
catastrophe lurking in the background is that these two legacies
might combine, with fissile materials leaking into the hands of
jihadis. Thus we might see nuclear weapons, most likely “dirty
bombs,” exploding in London and New York.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">Lieven
summarizes: “U.S. and British soldiers are in effect dying in
Afghanistan in order to make the world more dangerous for
American
and British peoples.”</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">Surely
Washington understands that U.S. operations in what has been
christened “Afpak” – Afghanistan-Pakistan – might destabilize
and radicalize Pakistan.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">The
most significant WikiLeaks documents to have been released so
far are
the cables from U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad, who
supports U.S. actions in Afpak but warns that they “risk
destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian
government and military leadership, and provoking a broader
governance crisis in Pakistan.”</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">Patterson
writes of the possibility that “someone working in [Pakistani
government] facilities could gradually smuggle enough fissile
material out to eventually make a weapon,” a danger enhanced by
“the vulnerability of weapons in transit.”</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">A
number of analysts have observed that bin Laden won some major
successes in his war against the United States.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">As
Eric S. Margolis writes in <i>The American Conservative</i> in
May,
“[bin Laden] repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the
U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing
Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would
ultimately bankrupt them.”</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">That
Washington seemed bent on fulfilling bin Laden’s wishes was
evident
immediately after the 9/11 attacks.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">In
his 2004 book “Imperial Hubris,” Michael Scheuer, a senior CIA
analyst who had tracked Osama bin Laden since 1996, explains:
“Bin
Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is
waging
war on us. [He] is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western
policies
toward the Islamic world,” and largely achieved his goal.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">He
continues: “U.S. forces and policies are completing the
radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden
has
been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since
the
early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that
the
United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable
ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his death.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">The
succession of horrors across the past decade leads to the
question:
<i>Was there an alternative to the West’s response to the 9/11
attacks?</i></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">The
jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could
have
been split and undermined after 9/11, if the “crime against
humanity,” as the attacks were rightly called, had been
approached
as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the
suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was
even
considered in the rush to war. It is worth adding that bin Laden
was
condemned in much of the Arab world for his part in the attacks.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">By
the time of his death, bin Laden had long been a fading
presence, and
in the previous months was eclipsed by the Arab Spring. His
significance in the Arab world is captured by the headline in a
<i>New
York Times</i> article by Middle East specialist Gilles Kepel:
“Bin
Laden Was Dead Already.”</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">That
headline might have been dated far earlier, had the U.S. not
mobilized the jihadi movement with retaliatory attacks on
Afghanistan
and Iraq.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">Within
the jihadi movement, bin Laden was doubtless a venerated symbol
but
apparently didn’t play much more of a role for al-Qaida, this
“network of networks,” as analysts call it, which undertake
mostly independent operations.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">Even
the most obvious and elementary facts about the decade lead to
bleak
reflections when we consider 9/11 and its consequences, and what
they
portend for the future.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><font style="font-size: 11pt" size="2">--Noam
Chomsky
</font>
</p>
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