Reinventing imperialism in the wake of September 11

The Geographical Journal, 2011

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2009

more interested in getting some sleep than in watching the latest news. So when I awoke the next morning and retrieved my email, the first message I got was from a young Malaysian colleague who wrote, "Prof-US is bombed!" Of course the news struck me with disbelief as it did my Chinese-Malaysian colleague and all other Malaysians. As we know, from that point onward, attitudes towards America from outside the US began their subtle shift from awe and appreciation to suddenly expressed dislike and opprobrium. The overbearing US role in world affairs up to that point in history suddenly came to be seen, as one Malaysian intellectual put it just a couple of weeks after 9/11, as the worst influence on the world in the whole 20 th century. 1 A more ambivalent attitude was expressed by one of my cab drivers who said of the 9/11 events, "it was bad because innocent people were killed, but it was good because the US got a slap in the face." We have all heard these sentiments before. Since the US invasion of Iraq attitudes towards the US have mainly gone down hill, as various international surveys show. But what of the fact that the airplane hijackers were Muslim militants and were, so they thought, in the service of 1

Rubina Saigol, '‘Ter-reign of Terror', In Terror, Counter-Terror. Joseph, Ammu and Kalpana Sharma (eds). New Delhi: Kali Press. , 2003

It has become customary to talk as if history began on September 11, 2001. Everything that is happening to the world today began when those planes crashed dramatically into the symbols of global capitalism and military might. The tendency to view September 11 as a major discontinuity in world affairs, obscures the fact that September 11 and the events that followed, in fact represent a continuity and, perhaps, even an intensification of global agendas that preceded September 11, 2001 by decades and even centuries. Colonialism, imperialism, globalization and militarization were not invented post September 11. September 11 became a catalyst for global agendas that were festering long before that date. It brought out into the open and laid bare the fangs of military might, state terror and economic domination that are implied in producing the events of September 11, 2001. I would go so far as to argue that in fact nothing has changed, at least not in any substantial way, and that what happened on September 11 and after, only accelerated the pace of what was already under way prior to that fateful date. ‘Ter-reign of Terror: September 11 and its Aftermath', In Radhika Coomaraswamy & Fonseka, Dilrukshi. Peace Work: Women, Armed Conflict and Negotiation. International Centre for Ethnic Studies. New Delhi: Women Unlimited. 2004. ‘Ter-reign of Terror', In Terror, Counter-Terror. Joseph, Ammu and Kalpana Sharma (eds). New Delhi: Kali Press. 2003.

Development, 2002

iticu.edu.tr

Globalization is the defining feature of our time. We, intensely, experience this phenemenon in our everyday life. It inevitably touches everywhere and changes who we are, what we do, where and how we live. Reactions to it are various. September 11 terrorist attacks to the World Trade Center and Pentagon by middle-eastern men who have university education, causing thousands of casualties, moved the globalization process and the discussions relating to it to another dimension, shaking all our established beliefs. Then came 'the Terror War' against Afghanistan by the US after Osame Bin Ladin was declared the chief instigator of the attacks and after Taliban rejected to deliver him to the US authorities. Before the disputes over this approach to terrorism died down, we began to witness the Iraqi War, launched by the coalition forces led by the US without the approval of the UN, for Saddam Hussein was seen as a threat to world peace with the mass destruction weapons he was supposed to possess. All these acts of violence that the masses are subjected to, indicate that violence may be the new rule in the globalization game. Resistance in the postwar Iraq and the recent acts of terror in Turkey and Spain seem to support this proposition. We think that if the UN, as an international power, undertakes a role which may balance the US in issues concerning security, international violence will be more easily controlled.

We examine here the global implications of Afghanistan's new economic and sociopolitical realities as an Islamic emirate. The question here is whether the rest of the world should merely watch the current situation or explore the possibilities of whatever can be done to help avert any crisis that promises to explode. As such, three facts readily stand out. One, the emerging Taliban regime is Pashtun dominated but the Pashtun nation actually straddles Afghanistan as also Pakistan. The Pashtuns are the dominant ethnolinguistic group in multi-ethnic Afghanistan but over two-thirds of Pushtuns actually live in the neighboring Pakistan. Two, despite all their protestations, the last time the Talibans ruled Afghanistan, during the 1996-2001 period, their most notable contributions to the world's harmony, peace and prosperity were the infamous 9/11 bombings in the US, the destruction of 11th century AD Buddha statue at Bamiyan, Afghanistan-a world heritage site, and the flogging and enslavement of women. And three, the geopolitical significance of this event and the likely spillover of terror to the neighborhood and beyond make one wonder if 20-years exile have moderated Taliban's world view and governance-style and if its new dispensation feels any need to rebuild the nation and what kind of nation it really want to build. For all intents and purposes, the new Taliban 2.0 interim government looks like the reincarnation of its old version and raises the spectacle that the world's never ending "War on Terror" is destined to continue. We examine these issues here and, hoping against all hopes that this time it may be different and unlike the COVID 19 pandemic that keeps returning again and again, we seek the seemingly utopian goal 1,2 of starting afresh and ascertain as to what the world can and should do to help that hapless country and its new regime stabilize.

The changes in America since the attacks of 9/11 have included some unfortunate developments. I briefly discuss twelve: less tolerance for dissent,