The ‘September 11 mindset’ and the heavy price to pay for it

Source: Reuters

The 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon will focus worldwide on the withdrawal of the United States military from Afghanistan where the attacks were plotted, and the return to power of the Taliban which hosted the key conspirators behind the plot.

In the US, there will be a lot of attention on the children of 9/11, who are now adults and have spent their entire life in a world completely transformed by the cataclysmic events of that day 20 years ago. These children’s elders will generally lament that the worst terrorist attacks on US soil have produced, two decades later, the most divided society that their country has known since the American Civil War.

In India, the popular view, judging by opinion makers on public platforms and their audience reactions, as well as selections of drawing room conversations, is that the US should not have left Afghanistan the way they did, and had a global duty to keep the Taliban at bay. If nothing else, to foil Pakistan’s internal meddling in India through a ‘Talibanised’ Afghan route. Such a partisan point of view, which entirely constitutes self-interest, is seen as logical from Pathankot to Palakkad and from Jamnagar to Jalpaiguri.

All these scenarios listed above, especially the populist Indian view, ignores the terrible cost of the fallout of what can be called a ‘September 11 mindset’. In nearly two decades, such a mindset has gained global acceptance as reflected in several defensive or pre-emptive wars. These wars began in Afghanistan in October 2001, escalated to Yemen a year later, spread to Iraq in March 2003, grievously hurt Lebanon in Israel-Hezbollah fighting in 2006, and has since engulfed Libya, Syria and many more countries.

Such huge costs in loss of lives, livelihoods, wealth and health have been largely hidden or ignored when politico-military decisions worldwide, including the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, are called to account. Brown University, an Ivy League institution in Rhode Island, has accounted for some of those costs in exceptional research and its results do not paint a pretty picture.

In Afghanistan alone, the direct human cost of the war since 9/11 has been 157,052 deaths. The main footnote to the research, in which Brown University’s Watson Institute collaborated with the Political Science Department at Boston University, explains: these statistics do “not include indirect deaths, namely those caused by loss of access to food, water, and/or infrastructure, war-related disease, etc.”

The deaths caused directly by the post-9/11 conflict in Pakistan have been put at 66,000 and in Yemen at 90,000. But they pale into relative insignificance before the casualty figure of 308,000 as a result of the Iraq war for regime change. The excuse for then US President George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq was to prevent any repeat of 9/11 because dictator Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”. The 9/11 mindset ignored the imperative of proving Bush’s claim, which turned out to be false. But by then, it was too late and the damage done was permanent.

The lead researchers, Catherine Lutz of Brown University and Neta C Crawford of Boston University say the cumulative direct human cost of post-9/11 wars is between 770,000 and 801,000, noting again that these exclude indirect deaths from such conflicts, which may never be fully documented. The periods covered by the research are from October 2001 for Afghanistan, October 2002 for Yemen and March 2003 for Iraq. These are the dates when the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq respectively and began air strikes in Yemen following Al Qaida’s bombing of the naval ship USS Cole.

All such acts, which flowed from a 9/11 mindset, have been conducted without any serious challenge with the exception of Syria, where Russia neutralised the US, preventing regime change in Damascus.

The Brown-Boston research has only covered the period up to October 2019 given the huge challenge of approximating and collating results from multiple sources of original data. It may be some more years before statistics running up to the end of these wars are available. The final toll, no doubt, will be much more depressing.

In a best-selling book by Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph E Stiglitz and Harvard University Kennedy School's Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer Linda J Bilmes, it has been calculated that the Iraq war cost the US in excess of $3 trillion. For that reason, the book has been titled The Three Trillion Dollar War. The final cost, including continuing medical care for thousands of injured US soldiers, their disability payouts and the costs of servicing borrowings for that war will be infinitely more staggering by when Americans get closure for this chapter in their history.

An exclusive investigation by USA Today in February revealed that the September 11 mindset is showing no signs of any declining appeal in the US, successive presidential actions to end foreign wars notwithstanding. The newspaper’s investigation showed that in the last three years alone, “US military activity either in direct combat, through drone attacks, border patrols, intelligence gathering or training other nations' security forces” expanded to 85 countries “in farther reaches of the globe than many Americans realise.”

To put a gloss on such war efforts, non-military threats which have mass acceptability, such as climate change and cybersecurity have been included among post-9/11 dangers to the world. Counter-terrorism is the new watchword, not war. “These globe-spanning operations have cost the US in blood and treasure and had a massive impact on populations around the world.” It has cost the rest of the world too. Unfortunately, that is a sad legacy of September 11 on its 20th anniversary.

Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.

K P Nayar has extensively covered West Asia and reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years.