Overall – how would you describe the events of 9/11?
The coordinated attack using passenger aircraft as lethal weapons of destruction was an unprecedented crime against humanity which traumatized the United States and also the western world and the population of most Muslim-majority countries. It was deliberately precipitated by Usama bin Ladin and his co-conspirators in an attempt to precipitate a clash between the West and the Islamic world (‘clash of civilizations’) that would be favourable to al-Qaeda’s ambitions. The Western intervention in Afghanistan adopted the wrong strategy at the outset but was an understandable reaction: no President of the United States could have left the attack unanswered. What is regrettable is that President George W. Bush and his principal advisers - notably Vice-President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld – were excessively preoccupied with using the 9/11 attacks as a justification for what came to be termed ‘regime change’ against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In reality, Saddam had no links with al-Qaeda and the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts were unrelated. This meant that in the long term the war in Iraq diverted vital resources in manpower and money away from Afghanistan and ensured that the war in Afghanistan would become a long and apparently unwinnable struggle.
How has it changed Afghanistan?
Had the Taliban government been prepared to surrender the al-Qaeda leadership in 2001 (and the Kandahar shura was divided on the issue and came close to doing so) an enormous amount of destruction and loss of life would have been prevented. There would still have been a problem for the West in knowing how to deal with the Taliban regime, which had close to pariah state status and was only recognized by three states (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE). But it would at least have been able to separate out the distinctive issues of the pursuit of al-Qaeda – which had perpetrated the atrocities of 9/11 – and the Taliban, who had given them sanctuary but not attacked targets in the West. Targetting both al-Qaeda and the Taliban simultaneously meant that the West made the crucial error of siding with the minority Northern Alliance and thereafter alienating the Pashtun majority. These early errors were compounded by having insufficient western troops on the ground and backing a corrupt and ineffective government headed by Hamid Karzai, who was called by bin Ladin ‘the mayor of Kabul’, thereby implying that he was a western stooge.
Pakistan?
Here the effect has been huge. Before 9/11 Pakistan had almost no problem with domestic terrorism. It was a fairly safe country for the westerner to move around in and there seemed reasonable hope that it could develop rapidly both economically and politically. The effect of the war in Afghanistan has been to create a significant insurgency within Pakistan itself, which is largely Pashtun-based and has some links to the Pashtun-based Taliban movement in Afghanistan. Immediately after 9/11, the US forced the Musharraf regime to reverse its foreign policy with regard to Afghanistan; but this has been unsustainable in the longer term. Once the US declared its wish to reduce its military commitment in Afghanistan drastically by 2014, Pakistan has increasingly had to plan for a future when it is once more on its own in dealing with its regional neighbours. And – hugely significant, but largely unreported in the West – President Obama’s escalation of Bush’s policy of drone attacks has done enormous harm to the US-Pakistan relationship. This has policy has become an ‘own goal’ for the US in the war on terror. On this, see the detailed arguments elsewhere in my blog.
Iraq?
Iraq’s infrastructure was seriously damaged by the allied invasion in 2003. This was an indirect consequence of 9/11, because George W. Bush was mistakenly convinced that Saddam Hussein ‘had to have been’ involved in those events. Another consequence has been the heightened sectarianism in Iraq and the involvement of Iran in its internal affairs. It remains to be seen whether a unified and stable Iraq can emerge from the mess of the war: once the tensions between Shia and Sunni have come out into the open, they are very difficult to remedy within a unified state.
The Middle East?
There have been significant al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda linked threats to Saudi Arabia (which were overcome), Yemen and Somalia (which have not been resolved). The political upheaval in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria is completely unrelated to al-Qaeda, however, which demonstrates how little impact – perhaps surprisingly – the events of 9/11 have had on the Middle East, which is proceeding at its own pace of development on internal issues.
Is the world safer since 9/11?
To the extent that there is a greater awareness of the threat from transnational terrorist groups, and cooperation between intelligence services, yes. But in the larger sense no, because by the very nature of terrorism – its random attacks on people unconnected with the conflict that motivates the attacker – soft targets are chosen and the timing is random and unpredictable. It is very difficult for governments, particularly in democratic countries with respect for civil liberties, to defend large urban populations at all times against every eventuality. It is therefore probable that terrorism will continue to be a significant problem, with the greatest danger posed by individuals and small groups who have little or no track record in previous acts of terrorism and are therefore not perceived as a threat by the security services: the recent atrocity committed in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik is a case in point.
Did the Bush administration overreact?
Yes, and predictably so. The issue was not so much that the United States would react militarily – this was inevitable since 9/11 was seen as a worse attack than Pearl Harbor in 1941 – but the ideological aspects of the response and the dysfunctional and chaotic organization of the war effort were hugely negative factors. On all this, my book False Prophets: the ‘clash of civilizations’ and the global war on terror (2008) highlights the issues. Most important of all, because the US was determined to intervene in Iraq, it took its eye off developments in Afghanistan, which was seriously under resourced in numbers of troops: this allowed the Taliban to regroup and bid for power once more.
Did US actions result in an anti-US coalition?/ increased anti-US sentiment?
There is strong opinion poll evidence that it did create anti-US sentiment in both the Middle East and Pakistan. This has not led to the formation of an anti-US coalition both because the US is too powerful and because of the differing interests of states in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia, for example, is more preoccupied with the threat from Iran than any threat from the US. Al-Qaeda sought to exploit the Israel—Palestinian conflict for its own purposes but this has been largely unsuccessful.
In British terms, what were the effects of 9/11 – and of the subsequent 7/7 attacks on the Tube and the bus in London?
People at first could not quite imagine that any British-born Muslims would come out and side so openly with bin Ladin and the international jihadists as did the 7/7 terrorists. This has led to a great deal of soul searching and some degree of muddled response. The Muslim communities in the UK have been under pressure to police their own young people and Britain’s long and – on the whole respectable – treatment of religious and ethnic minorities has been criticized at home and abroad. Yet a modern multicultural and multi-faith society with liberal values has to operate more or less in the open way that Britain has done. We need to take care not to throw out the good in a drive towards making our society safer from home-grown terrorism. It’s a difficult balance to strike and the development of appropriate policies is not helped by the fact that it has become a party political issue.
Have the wounds of 9/11 healed?
Certainly not in the US, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Perhaps more so in Britain, but there will be significant political fallout when the commission of enquiry on Britain’s intervention in Iraq, chaired by Sir John Chilcot, finally reports. This is likely to demonstrate how slavishly Tony Blair followed the line of George W. Bush, and question whether the intervention in Iraq was either legal under international law or justified by the threat which Saddam Hussein was said to pose to international security and the security of Britain. This is all only an indirect consequence of 9/11, but we need to remember that in the aftermath of these events George W. Bush was determined to ‘prove’ that in some way Saddam’s hand was behind the attacks on the US and that his regime posed a greater threat even than bin Ladin and al-Qaeda. Whatever one may think of Obama’s policy, his concentration on bin Ladin and al-Qaeda is a corrective to the Bush strategy.
Where were you on 9/11?
I was in a hotel room in Pakistan and watched the events live on TV. I watched with horror – as so many around the world did – knowing that the world would never be quite the same again, but praying in confidence that the insane objectives of al-Qaeda would not be supported by the Muslim world. The unequivocal condemnation of terrorism by Muslim-majority states was a notable feature of the weeks and months after 9/11: in that sense, Bush and Blair had a huge amount of international support which they managed to dissipate through their mistaken policies.
And your reaction then as you watched the towers fall?
A military response from the US was inevitable, but in an address made at a Christian church in Rawalpindi I made the distinction between the sort of response which I felt was likely – what I considered would be an overreaction and would make everything worse – and a somewhat slower, better conceived and internationally coordinated response which would reap better long-term dividends for the cause of international peace. I still believe that George W. Bush and his advisers – especially Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld – largely played into the hands of Usama bin Ladin and reacted in the way he hoped they would. Fortunately for the world, bin Ladin was unable to bring about the anti-US or anti-West coalition he had hoped the events of 9/11, and the US response to those events, would achieve.
