Of course, hindsight is 20/20 clear, as far as vision goes: U.S. President Bill Clinton could very well have nipped the plot in the bud. There is an important, almost urgent point to carrying out postmortems. It is so that we do not needlessly repeat history.
The attacks of September 11th 2001, when the United States of America suffered its worst calamity ever in peace time and on its own shores, were an organised terrorist act carried out by 19 hijackers, organised by numerous members of al-Qaeda.
Reasons for the attacks were stated before and after the attacks in several sources. These include the fatwā, videos and interviews of its recently deceased financier and face and leader, Osama bin Laden, as well as videos of his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Motivations pinpointed for the attacks include U.S. support for Israel, the presence of the U.S. military in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (hosts to Islam’s two holiest shrines at Mecca and Medina); also cited is the U.S. enforcement of U.N. sanctions against Iraq.
Indeed, the watershed now simply albeit ominously referred to as ‘9/11’ has come but has most definitely not gone.
One decade after, the most visible manifestation (in modern times) of the ‘Grudge War’ against Western civilisation (with roots in the Judeo-Christian worldview that though ignored by it are nonetheless held against it), which was taken to the gates of its bastion by the disgruntled high-profile elements of the Islamist establishment, has continued on not a few fronts.
To understand all these, our alphabet must start with ‘A’ for ‘Afghanistan’; the last, certainly from the point of view of the begrudging, has to be ‘Zionism’, whatever that means.
In his prescient groundbreaking 1996 book (first published as an article in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1993), “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order”, an insightful and powerful analysis of the forces driving global politics from the last into the present century, Samuel Huntington put forward a rather simple thesis:
The international system, formerly based on major Soviet, American, and Third World power blocs, is in transition to a new system composed of eight major civilizations. These are the Western, Japanese, Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and – “possibly”, says the theorist – African “civilisation”.
If only pre-9/11 America had listened to Mr. Huntington. In his stunning dare of a book, he explained how the population explosion in Muslim countries and the economic rise of East Asia are changing global geopolitics, developments that challenge Western dominance, promote opposition to supposedly “universal” Western ideals, and intensify inter-civilisation conflict over issues like nuclear proliferation, immigration, human rights, and democracy.
As noted by Mr. Huntington, the Muslim population surge has led to many small wars throughout Eurasia, and the rise of China could lead to a global war of civilizations. Mr. Huntington sets forth a strategy for the West to preserve its unique culture while emphasizing the need for people everywhere to learn to coexist in a complex, multi-polar, multi-civilisational world.
To understand the mind of al-Qaeda, the story must be told of the origins of the madrassa schools in Afghanistan. That was the land that terrorist body found room large enough to grow a body around its flaming heart.
Afghanistan had been invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979. The United States, fearful of a further expansion of Soviet influence, provided weapons and large amounts of cash to the Afghan resistance fighters.
After tens of thousands of deaths and years of warfare, the Soviets realised that they were not going to win control of this fiercely independent country. It marked the end of decades of Soviet expansion – and the beginning of the implosion of an empire that had reached too far and stretched itself too thin.
The United States watched the withdrawal and decided that with the Soviets vanquished, American’s job was done. The U.S. could pull out immediately and leave the Afghani people, amongst the poorest in the world, to live amongst their piles of bombed rubble. The American government did not lend a helping hand, as someone has said, “so much as buy them some brooms to help start the cleaning.”
It would prove a major strategic error. There was the need to rebuild the destroyed buildings, including the hospitals and the schools. The Soviets had been merciless in their attempts to intimidate the Afghan people by bombing them back to the Stone Age.
The U.S. did not stick around long enough to help in the rebuilding; its reason for intervention was anti-Soviet, not pro-Afghani. The Afghan government needed help in rebuilding; neighbours Iran and Saudi Arabia were only too eager to help.
Both countries also wanted to fill the vacuum that had been left by the departure of the two superpowers. They each made a big commitment to constructing schools. The only problem is that these were not secular schools. They were madrassas, or religious schools, that taught a very hate-filled version of Islam.
The Saudi schools taught their own anti-Western Wahhabi version and the Iranians built schools that taught their students to curse ‘the Great Satan’, America. The only difference between the Saudi schools and the Iranian ones was the degree of anti- Westernism in their curriculum.
According to CIA estimates, between them the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia sponsored the opening of over ten thousand madrassas in Afghanistan. A large percentage of the terrorists at large today were trained in these schools.
How different the world would have been today if those students had been taught one-two-threes and ABCs instead of being groomed to chant ‘Death to America’?
In Asne Seierstad’s stunning portrait of Afghan life, The Bookseller of Kabul, there is a chilling passage where the book’s protagonist muses on “how first-year schoolchildren learn the alphabet: ‘J is for Jihad, our aim in life; I is for Israel, our enemy; K is for Kalashnikov, we will overcome; M is for Mujahedeen our heroes; T is for Taliban…’ War was the central theme in math books too…: ‘Little Omar has a Kalashnikov with three magazines. There are twenty bullets in each magazine. He uses two-thirds of the bullets to kill sixty infidels. How many infidels does he kill with each bullet?’”
How does all these relate to yet another question, ‘Can another ‘9/11’ be avoided?’ And, how does all these relate to Nigeria’s homegrown Islamic terrorist enfant terrible, Boko Haram? Surely, the similarity in the streak of disdain for ‘Western education’, so-called, in both cannot be missed.
Terrorists in both climes (the American CIA has identified an affiliation between the two) have simply moved in to fill the vacuum where proper education was lacking.
This disdain for education that replaces an empty mind with an open one has come to serve as a crutch but also a weapon in the ‘Grudge War’, something to limp along with but also take out to whack the rest of the world on the head with from time to time.
While it is true that most Muslims are not terrorists, most terrorists in the world have been and still are Muslims, often folks heroes for hordes of the faithful all over the world. The fact is that Muslim leadership has done far from enough to change the profile.
This needs to change. Desirable education for grappling with New World realities for equipping the individual to make a contribution to society is neither Western nor Islamic; it quite simply is. For example, the numeral system in universal use today was a contribution from the Arabs, most of whom have been Muslim.
Hence the mal fide moment when leading Muslims, using the system against the system, sought to rub in the vanquishing point of ‘9/11’ by clamouring to have it as a site for a shrine (interfaith, so-called; a blatant canard) must be recounted and recanted by Muslims.
The children are watching – and waiting to be properly educated. As Mohandas Gandhi said, “If we are to reach real peace in this world and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with children.”
