Daily Times

Sixteen years after 9/11 and the world is still burning. In fact, contrary to what the song says, it hasn’t always been this way since the world has been turning.

A casual glance at how things have ‘progressed’ reads like a comedy of errors, with the US cast in the role of blithering sidekick.

In Afghanistan, where it all started with a war that the US didn’t have to wage, the Taliban, who didn’t have anything to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, now control more than half the country. With ISIS having sprung up there and jostling the former for power. Remnants of Al Qaeda are still said to be enjoying Pakistani hospitality, as are members of the Haqqani network. Top it all off, the Americans have spectacularly failed to extricate themselves from the quagmire of their own making. Indeed, Donald Trump has inexplicably pinned his hopes on a few thousand more troops to seal the deal in Afghanistan.

But then he, like those before him, is playing to the cheap seats.

In other words, there is, perhaps, more method in the US madness than we would have believe.

From a strategic point of view, the Afghanistan debacle is a success story. For it represented the first out of area operation for the NATO war machine. That is, its first non-European mission. And it has paved the way for other interventions in Libya and Syria. Indeed, just this week the Alliance chief called for a global response on North Korea. NATO has long been regarded by those in the know as the de facto military arm of the US expansionist project. And not even the end of the Cold War has been sufficient to render it redundant.

These other interventions are not as random as they may appear. After all, North Korea was part of the original Bush axis of evil, alongside Iraq and Iran. Decimating Baghdad was, of course, the spark that ignited the region. And the ante has well and truly been upped when it comes to warmongering against Tehran. Going by the previous US record, the worry is that war on Iran may be closer than many of us would care to believe. For despite NATO’s tough talking on Pyongyang – we all know that North Korea has the nuclear bomb. Indeed, it did its first test firing back in 2006, just three years after it withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That this withdrawal came a mere couple of months before the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq and went unpunished lends credence to claims that Washington knew that Saddam had no WMDs. And that it was for this very reason that the rush to war was undertaken. Less than a year later came the axis of evil round 2: Cuba, Libya and Syria.

Thus from the US perspective, the GWOT has been meeting all of its targets. Iraq was largely believed to be a test run for its Middle East democracy project -namely transforming the region into one amenable to Israel. Given the bullying of Qatar over the latter’s recognition of Hamas as a legitimate Palestinian partner it seems that this agenda remains unchanged.

If the US really wanted peace in either the Middle East or, indeed, here in the Af-Pak region – it would have used the 9/11 attacks to renew impetus to commit unequivocally to a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution. That is, if it were truly interested in delegitimising the extremist rhetoric. That it hasn’t suggests that it wants to be entrenched in this part of the world for the foreseeable future.

Published in Daily Times, September 12^th 2017.