By Jaya Ramachandran
IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis
BRUSSELS (IDN) – When the planes hit the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, Matthew Goodwin was in a classroom in Detroit listening to a lecture on the Vietnam War. Now Associate Fellow at Britain’s prestigious Chatham House, he recalls: “Looking outside the window, cars stopped in the middle of the street with their radios turned up, surrounded by anxious Americans. It was like a movie scene.” The impact was not limited to the United States.”
Though 9/11 has most often been viewed through its impact on international relations – the creation of new alliances, the ‘war on terror’, Afghanistan and justification for the invasion of Iraq – Dr Goodwin points out that Nine Eleven also influenced domestic political arenas. And this in three main ways:
– Citizens across many Western democracies have become more concerned over security matters.
– Party politics have been affected. Prior to 9/11, European far-right parties had begun to poll well by focusing on public anxiety over immigration, integration, and law and order.
– Public policy has been influenced. The events on 9/11 forced European governments to think more seriously about how to prevent violent extremism and counter radicalization within Muslim communities.
“Yet, ten years on,” he adds, “we are still some way from understanding the precise drivers of support for violent extremism in all its forms and it might not be another ten years before we can begin to explain convincingly its causes.”
Michael Cox, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, says: “When the United States was attacked . . . its position in the world seemed completely unassailable . . . A decade on the U.S. is an altogether different, less confident, place. With China rising and even buying up a good deal of America’s debt, few today talk as they once confidently did of an ever-lasting American primacy.”
DEPTHS AND HEIGHTS
In a contribution for Chatham House’s monthly magazine The World Today, Cox recalls: “Having seen off the Soviet Union ten years earlier, and having then experienced what can only be viewed as one of the more successful economic decades in its over two hundred year history, America at the start of the new millennium looked to be riding high in an international system where it clearly faced challenges and problems but no serious threat worthy of the name.
“So powerful did it in fact seem that few could even remember that rather anxious little moment just before the end of the Cold War when writers like Paul Kennedy had been talking earnestly about the republic’s inevitable decline over the longer term. A nation with deficits as large as the U.S., and carrying the imperial burden that it did, simply could not go on running the world’s affairs. There was only one way for it to go – and that, he concluded, was downwards.”
This view appeared rather odd when George W. Bush took over from President Clinton in 2000, and in fact far removed from reality as the US started to mobilise its massive resources in response to what had happened in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Cox recalls: “Even critics were at first deeply impressed – even that old ‘declinist’ Paul Kennedy who waxed perhaps rather too lyrically in one article written in early 2002 about that proverbial American bird of prey compelling respect from its friends and forcing even its enemies to submit to its will. This was clearly no ordinary superpower. As he went on to note, this very special eagle was now flying higher than ever. Nor was this his view alone.
ROME ON THE POTOMAC
“Across the political spectrum, from critical Europeans on the left to American neo-conservatives on the right, few seemed prepared to dispute the idea that the United States bore more than a family resemblance to Empires of the past – with one fairly obvious difference: this new Rome on the Potomac was not about to decline any time soon. Another century awaited it.”
It is indeed well worth recalling this mood today, as Cox rightly points out, if we are to fully appreciate how far things have changed since 9/11. At the turn of the century Americans felt self-confident and the U.S. acted as if there was little that it could not do – even invade Iraq with little concern for the deeply disturbing impact this might have on both the Middle East and its own position in the world. A decade on and America looks to have changed almost beyond recognition.”
A distinct sign is the election of Barack Obama as President in late 2008. Among the most important reasons for this, says Cox, was the simple fact that Americans no longer felt confident about the direction in which the country was going after two terms of a republican administration that had first brought them the Iraq war and then the financial crisis of 2007.
“Whether or not Obama has delivered on all of his promises remains a moot question. What is not in question however is the extent to which his remarkable rise was made possible by a widespread sense that America was in crisis and that something new – and possibly radical – was needed to restore U.S. standing in the world and possibly prevent it experiencing another great depression.”
But troop losses in Afghanistan and Iraq, the huge economic costs involved in waging these wars, and the fear that the means involved in fighting a particular kind of enemy might be undermining U.S. core values, has not only done much to dent American amour propre but made Americans increasingly uncertain about the country’s purpose in the world, writes Cox.
SANS THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE
“This would be bad enough. But what has further contributed to Americans’ sense that the world is no longer moving in their direction is firstly the impact that the economic crisis has had on that intangible thing called the American way of life – only a quarter of Americans in 2011 believed that their children would have better chances than themselves – plus an even stronger sense that changes taking place globally are fast undermining its ability to shape what is taking place around them,” says Cox.
He concludes: “There has certainly been too much talk of late about the next century being Asian and the axis of power moving rapidly away from the west to the east. Still, as economists like Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs noted, some time ago, while the U.S. waged war in the Middle East and against the Taliban in Afghanistan, others – some of those so-called BRIC’s (an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India and China) – seemed to be getting on with the business of making money, building new partnerships, and pulling themselves out of the economic crisis a good deal more rapidly than the U.S. and its transatlantic allies.”
Viewing from a different perspective, Jason Burke argues that “the threat posed by al Qaeda ten years on from 9/11 has weakened with regards to its senior leadership, its network of affiliates and its broader ideology.”
Burke, who is the South Asia correspondent for The Guardian and The Observer, and his book, The 9/11 Wars, is published in September, advises to drive out through the outskirts of Kabul, past the museum where priceless statues were smashed by the Taliban, past the ruined palace and on along the rutted road towards the village of Rishkor.
“Beyond the patch of wooded glades and streams known as Daoud’s Garden, after the former Afghan president, is an old Afghan Army base,” writes Burke. “A decade ago, in the summer of 2001, it was one of the main training camps for Pakistani and Arab volunteers learning basic military techniques before being dispatched to the frontlines to fight alongside the Taliban. It was also home to a smaller camp where specialised courses in urban terrorism were taught to selected al Qaeda recruits.”
Now Rishkor is the site of a major base where American special forces teach Afghan National Army commandos. Daoud’s Garden, at least on a weekend, is full of picnicking families, reports Burke.
He is convinced that the death of Osama bin Laden, shot by American special forces in May 2011 in a compound in the northern Pakistani town of Abbottabad where he had been hiding for up to six years, was “not the beginning of a new evolution of the extremist group he led but the end of a long period of decline.” [IDN-InDepthNews – Sep 2, 2011]