America’s response to September 11: two decades of war, repression, torture, espionage, barbarism and darkness | The failure of the war on terrorism

From Paris

The dates fall like guillotines which disperse the members of a failed, absurd, violent and tenacious strategy in global geopolitics. On September 20, 2001, nine days after the September 11 attacks, the former US president George W. Bush delivered a speech in Congress in support of reprisals against the dispersed Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan. “The Taliban,” said Bush, “will hand over the terrorists or suffer the same fate. The world we know began around this time. From September 11, we ceased to be teenagers and entered the era of mass espionage, intransigent police checks, the ideology of security and obedience, assumed torture. (Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Guantanamo, CIA detention centers, clandestine arrests, kidnappings, summary executions) in the name of the fight against terrorism. The aftermath of September 11 is a pervasive threat to human freedom. The traces of this tragedy also shaped the political temptations of the world’s leading power. The writer Douglas kennedy noted that the choice of Donald trump “This is the direct result of the xenophobic fear engendered by this monstrous attack.”

The American war against terrorism, including the Taliban, ended with a masterful turn in 2021: Washington had to sit down to negotiate in February 2020 (Donald Trump administration) with its enemies in 2001 on the terms of the withdrawal of its troops and those of NATO in Afghan territory. $ 837 billion was spent on the war, plus an additional $ 145 billion to rebuild Afghanistan amid a two-decade conflict in which tens of thousands of people died. At the end, Osama Bin Laden and his barbarism cherished a posthumous victory: to defeat the empire where it wanted it to go, that is to say in Afghanistan, and to globalize radical Islamism. His legacy is not extinguished because Al-Qaida has reincarnated in the bloody radicalism of the Islamic State and is still present and active in the Sahel, where it operates with a coalition of Islamist groups (JNIM, Groupement pour le support à l’islam et aux Muslims), in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia (Al Shabab) or even Syria, in the province of Idlib, under the control of the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant (Hayat Tahrir), an Islamic group jihadist-Salafist allied with Al-Qaeda in Syria and also present in Iraq and Lebanon.

Survivors

Even the truth about the attacks of 20 years ago has not emerged from the rubble of the Word Trade Center or the Pentagon. About 3,000 people have died, including 5 Argentines, and it was not until September 2, 2021 that Joe Biden, by an executive order, ordered “the Department of Justice and all relevant agencies to oversee a review of the declassification. documents related to investigations. September 11th “.

His decree is a promise of an electoral campaign and also responds to the vast legal battle that both the survivors and the families of the victims of September 11 have waged against successive US administrations, Saudi Arabia and other states they consider to be. “Accomplices” to the attacks. The Families and Survivors of 9/11 United Against Terrorism group is convinced the FBI lied and destroyed evidence showing Riyadh’s links to the 9/11 terrorists (of the 19 commanders, 15 were Saudis).

Bin Laden never calculated the succession of tragedies that the revenge of the empire would bring. Bin Laden and Bush stole the world we lived in and moved to one that looks like the worst fictions written before the attacks. “Counterterrorism” has colonized the planet and put in the hands of states the power to search every nook and cranny of our lives. It has also fueled Islamophobia and caused death and devastation in other countries. We often forget to mention that the invasion of Iraq (2003) was made in the name of the fight against terrorism and the false presence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. The war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, the war in Iraq on March 20, 2003.

the taliban

On September 11, he suspended and broke history. 20 years later, the United States is still in mourning, there are still 1000 unidentified victims of the attacks, Afghanistan is a shattered nation and the Taliban are once again ruling in a country the West has mercilessly abandoned after trying to save it.

On the huge concrete walls that NATO built in Kabul, the Taliban painted the phrase: “We have conquered Afghanistan and defeated the Americans with the help of God. The essential truth is missing: with help from Washington. This truth is described in a relentless report from SIGAR, the Special Inspectorate General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan. The report “What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Reconstructing Afghanistan” is the most rigorous inventory that exists on the colossal expedition of empires under the command of the First Empire. The text of nearly 150 pages lists all the failures, from the moving dance of the objectives (eradication of Al-Qaeda, overthrow of the Taliban, restoration of civil society, defeat of radical Islamism) to the strategy of “imposing , clumsily, models of Western technocrats in Afghan economic institutions; training the security forces with advanced weapons that these forces could not understand; impose a formal rule of law in a country where 80 or 90 percent of conflicts are resolved by informal means ”.

How much did it all cost? Brown University has assessed the “real” human costs of wars after 9/11: 929,000 dead, including 387,000 civilians, and 38 million displaced. There is another unprecedented prize: that of a democracy that has trampled on its values ​​to fight its adversaries. The sinister Guantanamo prison continues to function: it is a territory without rights where there are still 39 detainees, including Khalid Cheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 2001 attacks. There are 17 detainees who ignore the charges and do not have date for a possible trial. The story points to another calamity: The Afghan government which was formed after the stampede of the “allies” in August 2021 counts among its leaders several former Taliban prisoners who spent years in Guantanamo.

On September 11, 20 years ago, George W. Bush declared: “America has been targeted because we are the brightest beacon of freedom and opportunity in the world. No one will stop this light from shining ”. No one stopped it except the fact that this beacon has given us two decades of death, rape, revenge, repression, torture, espionage, wars, barbarism and darkness.

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