The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist strikes on New York and Washington becomes a landmark in the post-Cold War era world order.Something dramatically changed not so much due to the fact that for the first time the American mainland came under attack as for the consequences for the international security system in terms of the United States’s response to the attack.
There can be no two opinions that the root causes of 9/11 are to be traced to the crisis in the Middle East. This crisis was in the making for decades and it emanated out of the festering wounds of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the unresolved Palestinian problem.
A host of other issues envelop the Middle East crisis, the two principal ones being first, the ‘discontent of globalisation’ in terms of the rising aspirations of political empowerment and good governance and, second, the West’s political, military, economic and cultural domination of the strategically important region and its oil-rich countries for almost a century since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
The United States stood at the epicentre of the Middle East crisis for its perceived one-sided regional policies favouring Israel and for its sponsorship of the ‘pro-West’ authoritarian Arab regimes. What emerges with the past 10 years’ hindsight is that the US continues to prevaricate in addressing the root causes of the crisis. The Middle East peace process is at a standstill. Israel’s obduracy continues and the hopes raised by US President Barack Obama’s overtures to the Muslim world have been dashed. On the contrary, the US hopes to re-establish the western dominance in the region in newer forms by manipulating the ‘Arab Spring’ instead of being on the ‘right side of history, as American propaganda claims.
The George W. Bush administration seized the 9/11 attacks to expound a doctrine of interventionism in circumstances threatening its core interests and vital concerns and on humanitarian considerations. Bypassing the United Nations Charter and international law, US preferred the ‘coalition of the willing’ to undertake military actions in foreign lands, violating the territorial integrity of sovereign nations. The doctrine appeared in the post-cold war era in a nascent form in the western intervention in the Balkans to dismember the former Yugoslavia, but its first robust appearance is to be traced to the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.
The Bush administration capitalized on worldwide sympathy toward the US in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to militarily intervene in the two-decade old civil war in Afghanistan and to effect a regime change in that hapless country. The intervention was rationalised in terms of America’s homeland security following the 9/11 attacks and as well as humanitarian considerations of ‘liberating’ the Afghan people from the yoke of harsh Taliban rule. The world community passively acquiesced.
Whereas, the US had been a promoter of the Taliban in the mid-1990s and almost up to the 9/11 attacks Washington was in dialogue with the Taliban. The materials available today show that the Taliban leadership was willing to jettison links with the al-Qaeda and offered to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial after the 9/11 attacks, but the Bush administration ignored the overture. Again, the anti-Taliban forces of the Afghan opposition known as the Northern Alliance and the late King Zahir Shah joined hands to set up a government-in-exile and offered to work for a broad-based power structure in Kabul and expel al-Qaeda elements. But the Bush administration brushed aside the Afghan proposition. In short, despite lack of evidence linking the Taliban directly with the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration chose to invade Afghanistan.
Looking back, even as the ‘war on terror’ provided the alibi and al-Qaeda became the ‘enemy’, the US intervention had a ‘hidden agenda’. Today, after much death and destruction, with the Afghan war in stalemate, Afghan reconstruction and nation-building abandoned and neighbouring Pakistan seriously destabilised, the US is prepared to negotiate with the Taliban for a power-sharing arrangement that returns the Taliban to mainstream Afghan life. Although bin Laden has been eliminated and al-Qaeda significantly weakened, the US seeks to establish long-term military presence in the region.
Meanwhile, the US has brought the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] into Afghanistan as the provider of security. The US intends to expand the NATO presence into Central Asia to project the western alliance as the only global organisation that can intervene in ‘hotspots’. Plainly put, in geopolitical terms, the US exploited the 9/11 to establish a permanent western military presence in the highly strategic space that overlooks China, Russia and Iran (and Pakistan).
The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 is essentially an ‘advanced version’ of the Afghan intervention. No credible alibi could be found for it and all the fictitious reasons advanced as justification for the US invasion stand discredited. Nor was there any clear UN sanction for the invasion. Suffice to say, after horrendous violence and destruction of Iraq and the death of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, like in Afghanistan, the US is single-mindedly focusing on somehow securing a long-term military presence in that country despite the vehement Iraqi opposition to occupation. Again, the agenda is geopolitical: exercising control over the oil-rich country; containing Iran; and removing a fountainhead of Arab nationalism.
Without doubt, the Iraq-Afghan experience emboldened the US to strategize the intervention in Libya. The terrible beauty of the Libyan war is that without coming to the forefront of invasion of yet another Muslim country, the US masterminded the NATO’s intervention by forming a ‘coalition of the willing’ and leading it from the rear. The NATO powers deployed Special Forces and sponsored the Libyan ‘rebels’ and under the garb of ‘humanitarian’ considerations, they brought about the regime change in Tripoli. This enterprise does not enjoy UN mandate, but the US remains undeterred and the NATO proposes to remain in Libya for an indeterminate period on the pretext of stabilizing that country. In geopolitical terms, the NATO has arrived in the Middle East and has positioned itself for future interventions in Africa.
Syriacould well be the next target for the US. The US rhetoric suggests the likelihood of ‘humanitarian’ intervention to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad. If that happens, the NATO will surely spearhead the intervention and the objective will be the same as in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – namely, the establishment of a pliant successor regime that sub-serves the US’s geo-strategic interests.
In sum, the 9/11 attacks opened the floodgates of US military intervention in a vast region which the American pundits call the ‘Greater Middle East’, stretching from the Levant to the Central Asian steppes bordering China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, and in Africa. The US exploited the ‘war on terror’ as a window of opportunity to establish its military presence in the so-called ‘AfPak’ region and in Central Asia on a long-term basis and to arrest the steady decline of its influence in the Middle East in the recent decades. Indeed the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa also happen to be regions which are rich in resources and the US agenda needs to be seen as a scramble for scarce resources. The US hopes to counter China which figures as a big player in Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, roll back Russia’s traditional influence in Central Asia, and contain Iran, which has surged as a regional power in the Middle East, challenging Israel’s traditional dominance.
A core US objective is to project NATO as the provider of security in the ‘Greater Middle East’. The NATO is forging partnership agreements with Israel on the one hand and with the ‘pro-West’ regimes of the Gulf Cooperation Council on the other. Alas, some Arab regimes find it expedient to collaborate with this colonial-era tactic of ‘divide-and-rule’. Through selective intervention – not Bahrain but Syria; not Yemen but Libya; not Saudi Arabia but Iran – the US strives to calibrate the forces clamouring for change and reform in the Middle East and morph them into political dispensations that would acquire representational character but would cooperate with the US regional strategies and serve western geopolitical interests in the new world order.
The fallouts of the 9/11 attacks have been very negative for the international system. The heart of the matter is that the struggle against terrorism in the 10-year period since the 9/11 attacks provided an alibi for the US to tackle challenges in the global scenario posed by the struggle for scarce resources, China’s rise, decline of America’s global influence and the growing multipolarity in world politics… There is no certainty the US strategy will succeed. What is certain as of now is that great volatility has appeared in the international system.
