Ten years have passed, and there is still much to grieve about
September 11, 2001. There are the lives that were lost that terrifying
and tragic day: the 2,977 victims in the towers and the Pentagon and on
the planes; and the 415 law enforcement officers and firefighters
killed, public workers who were justly celebrated at the time as
heroes—an impulse we would do well to remember today, as their
counterparts are pilloried as pension gluttons and public service is
casually denigrated as government bloat.
Lost, too, was the chance for a politics built around the kind of
social solidarity embodied by those first responders and expressed by
the society so moved by their sacrifice. Instead, thanks largely to the
administration of George W. Bush, we got a politics of fear that helped
launch a long “war on terror,” which in turn gave us a lost decade of
American life.
If that sounds melodramatic, consider a few figures: 4,442 American
soldiers dead in Iraq, 1,584 in Afghanistan. As of March, $1.25 trillion
spent to destroy and then fail to rebuild and stabilize those
countries, a cost that has crippled our capacity to respond to an
economic crisis that has devastated the American working and middle
classes and reverberated throughout the world. Weighing on our
collective conscience, also, are hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis,
tens of thousands of dead Afghans, millions displaced—the overwhelming
majority of whom had nothing to do with Al Qaeda’s heinous crimes on
9/11. To this, add a legacy of distrust, anger and grievance against the
United States that will persist for years to come.
To salvage something from this lost decade, we should at least try to draw the right lessons from it.
First, although some measures to guard against acts of terrorism and
to destroy Al Qaeda were of course necessary, our large-scale military
efforts have been, at best, largely irrelevant to the goals of achieving
justice and keeping us safe. Osama bin Laden, like Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed, head of Al Qaeda operations, was hiding not in some contested
part of Pakistan directly ensnared in the Afghan War but in the heart of
that country, in bin Laden’s case just thirty-five miles north of
Islamabad, steps from Pakistan’s top military academy. The lesson here
is that we do not have a military threat that requires us to defend the
Karzai government in Afghanistan but a political challenge that lies in
getting the Pakistani authorities to cooperate in curtailing the
activities of violent Islamist groups. In this regard, the war in
Afghanistan long ago became counterproductive.
Second, we have not so much won in the “war on terror” as Al Qaeda
has lost because its extremist ideology has little if any appeal to Arab
and Muslim societies, especially to the new generation in Egypt and
Tunisia that has taken to the streets for democracy, jobs and justice.
Third, our greatest defense against terrorism has been our democratic
institutions and our tradition of religious and ethnic tolerance. At
times over the past decade, as with the passage of the Patriot Act, we
have seen those institutions and ideals compromised.
President Obama was elected in part because he appealed to our better
post-9/11 selves—the selves personified by the first responders. He
promised to respect civil liberties not only because it would keep us
safe—“There are no shortcuts to protecting America,” he said—but because
it is right. That is something else to grieve: as David Shipler observes in this issue, President Obama may have come too soon in the historical cycle to fulfill his own promise.