How Did We Get Here?
I've written this before. I thought the 1990s were great. It was great in the wake of the end of the Cold War and many things seemed possible. Movies were fun, rock was resurgent, new things were going on in music, books were fun and interesting. It was like a flowering of ideas after a very long repression. I used to wonder how is this beautiful era going to end? I guess we found out with two things. The first was the election of Dubya, aka George W Bush as President. It was a cliff hanger that went to the supreme court and somehow the Republican lawyers wrested the outcome from Al Gore. It was the moment the Republicans allowed themselves to overtly break the rules and law to have their way. It would turn out to be an appetiser for the kind of shenanigans to follow.
The second thing was 9/11. After the Twin Towers came down, all bets were off. The world changed overnight and suddenly we were 'at war' with 'terror'. A flood of rhetoric washed out from the White House that led to things like the war in Afghanistan (probably legit) and the Marin Iraq *definitely not legit) as well as a slew of anti-terror laws and overreach by surveillance. The last two decades continue to be marred by the responses to 9/11 which were more often than not over-reactions. Yes, nearly 4000 people died and a whole slew of system failures were exposed as well as giving birth to the internet conspiracy theory culture, but it has to be said the trillions spent on prosecuting the foreign wars and surveilling the domestic population is a ridiculously expensive price to pay.
In that time America watered down its education and health to move money to its military industrial complex, and essentially created a generation of under-educated idiots susceptible to conspiracy theories on the internet. The worst aspects of that as blowback could be seen in the storming of the US Capitol earlier this year.
Let's say that is all by-the-by. 9/11 happened because of a string of incompetent decisions as well and lack of leadership to act on reports. The FBI had reports it didn't follow up. The CIA delivered reports to the White House that the White House did not follow up. It was so slack entire areas of conspiracy theories have grown up around them but the essential truth is that the government of the day, the Bush Jr Administration, was largely asleep at the wheel. And when the dust settled, the republican administration used it as an opportunity to overreach on surveillance and expand powers. They say in politics one should never let a good crisis go to waste, but that sort of cynicism was exactly what characterised the events that followed. To protect democracy, they decided to circumvent democracy. We are still living with the consequences of those terrible decisions.
My God What Have We Done?
There is a leader of Islamist thought Aga Khan IV who believes that 9/11 is a direct result of the world community ignoring the plight of the human tragedy of Afghanistan at the time. It is hard to argue with it if you remember what Afghanistan under the Taliban the first time around was like. It was repressive, regressive, iconoclastic, and most certainly toxic and misogynistic in a way that is off the scales for contemporary people living civilised society.
Throughout the 1990s we sort of let all of that slide. They were very much on the nose but we had a way of pretending it was too far away to matter. I am certain that we will fall into that mindset again soon enough, but for the record most people didn't know where Kabul was on the map until the Americans finally sent troops.
I think about that indifference a lot. In stark contrast to the globalised congeniality of the 1990s, there were plenty of people suffering under terrible regimes. We were very casual about the plight of people in the islamic world, partly because we didn't want to tell them how to run their governments. The world was celebrating and partying to the end of the Cold War. Bad Islamist governance in Kabul was like a distant problem we really didn't want to know about.
There is a very telling episode of 'Seinfeld' from the 1990s that illustrates this point. It's the episode titled 'The Visa'. It aired in January 1993 which feels like yesterday in some weird way; at least a lot closer to 9/11 than where we are today.
George meets a lawyer named Cheryl (Maggie Han) who thinks he's very funny. When he tells Jerry and Elaine, they enthusiastically plan a double date, much to George's dismay, as he imagines himself being upstaged by Jerry. At the restaurant, Elaine asks Cheryl for advice on dealing with the lawsuit from Ping, the Chinese food delivery boy whom Elaine injured in "The Virgin". Cheryl reveals that she is the prosecuting attorney in the case, as Ping is her cousin. Jerry and Elaine joke about this coincidence, making Cheryl laugh hysterically. While she is away, George makes them promise not to be funny around her. Jerry overdoes it, making comments that are so morbid that Cheryl is depressed by the end of the date.
At Jerry's apartment, Kramer returns early from baseball fantasy camp, where he accidentally punched Mickey Mantle. Elaine sees Cheryl with George and thanks her for persuading Ping to drop the case. She says that she did that because they all seemed like such nice people. As Elaine is giving Jerry the mail that she has been holding for him while he was out of town, Babu Bhatt, the Pakistani who Jerry tried to help in "The Cafe", is hauled off by the INS. Jerry had helped him get a job and the apartment down the hall. Jerry and Elaine discover Babu's Visa renewal form in Jerry's belated mail; it had been delivered to Jerry's address by mistake. They go to the jail where Babu is being held. When they tell him what happened he becomes angry. Jerry promises to straighten things out.
Jerry has lunch with Cheryl, where he continues his morose façade, so that he can ask her to solve Babu's problems with the INS. When she sees George, she confesses that she is attracted to Jerry's dark, disturbed personality. George, realizing his scheme has backfired, tells her the truth. Stunned at this revelation, she gets up and leaves.
At Jerry's apartment, Elaine sees Ping and thanks him for dropping the case. He sneers and tells her the case is back on because they all made Cheryl mad due to Jerry's deception. Babu's brother enters and says Babu has been deported, since Cheryl neglected to follow through on the favor after George's revelation. Back in Pakistan, Babu swears eternal vengeance against Jerry.
Ouch. At the time I watched this episode, I really felt for Babu. I laughed - but I knew Babu's problems were very real, as opposed to the decidedly trivial preoccupations and obsessions of all of the characters in 'Seinfeld'. The reality gap as it were, was what made it very black humour. It turned out to be very prescient. When 9/11 happened, Babu came to mind. 9/11 was Babu exacting vengeance upon us for our indifference.
How Did We End Up There?
We may ask ourselves how it is we were still stationing troops in Afghanistan all these years later, until last month. The protracted history of bad decisions goes a long way back, but it may point to the funding and arming of Mujihadeen resistance fighters against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By training those people and arming them, and then beating the Soviets out of Afghanistan they decided that the West could be beaten. And in abandoning Afghanistan to its own devices in the 1990s led to a Taliban government which saw fit to harbour Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. Without going into the various theories - conspiracy and otherwise - about whether Al Qaeda was really a thing or merely a designation/conflagration by the CIA, it is true that Afghanistan as a state went rogue and allowed itself to sponsor terrorism abroad, and it was this lack of judgement that led to 9/11 and the subsequent war and occupation of Afghanistan.
That's all on one side. The other side is the utter lack of judgement on the side of the what became known as the Coalition of the Willing. That was the countries led by the USA that was happy to march into both Afghanistan and Iraq. Australia's part in it is pretty sorry. We sent our best troops and as they stayed and stayed, they became psychopaths on safari, committing acts that can only be described as war crimes. Nobody thought we would be there for so long, but without judgment there was no way of pulling out of Afghanistan without pulling down the state of Afghanistan we set up in the wake of the Taliban.
It took a President even worse than George W Bush to get the USA out of Afghanistan and his solution was simply to give up Afghanistan to the very same Taliban the USA ousted in 2002. The mind boggles. It's as if Donald Trump slept through 9/11 and missed it completely. Or didn't really care. Maybe he did us all a favour in ending a forever war, and we are all looking that gift horse in the mouth. Maybe Afghanistan is better off under the Taliban, as a beacon of intolerance and religious extremism and medieval legalism. After all, why should we spend money on a place that doesn't want to conform to a civilised world? Maybe we can enjoy a decade of no wars; because I feel like we should maybe party a little bit like it's 1999, once this pandemic lifts.
There are people in Afghanistan who are angry the West left, and let them in that terrible Dark Ages limbo. Yet it is easily arguable that we shouldn't have been there at all for as long as we were. At some point we can't fight the geopolitical gravity forever. Whatever goes up to Afghanistan must come down.
So Will It Happen Again?
With any luck, with all the civil liberties we have given up, and all the compromises to our democracy, the one thing that won't happen again is a 9/11. Is it a high price to pay? Probably in as much as it still doesn't guarantee it won't happen again - but it is highly unlikely. Bitter lessons were learnt at all levels of government everywhere.
As of that day, governments have given licences to themselves to compromise your privacy in exchange for security, and maybe we're all safer for it, but we are definitely not better for it. And I for one believe it when military people say we will be back in Afghanistan soon enough. It's just a terrible enough situation to draw us in. With any luck it will be the Chinese who end up trying to sort out that mess instead of us. That, would be a better outcome. Let somebody else suffer Afghanistan instead.
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