Amitabh Mattoo: America’s failure of imagination / P B Mehta: What 9/11 unleashed on us / Ben Rhodes: Afghanistan withdrawal has ended the 9/11 era / Uday Bhaskar & Madhavan Palat on 20 Years after 9/11
No other event of the 21st century has defined international politics quite in the same manner as that of September 11, 2001. Twenty years later, the world is still grappling with the deeper philosophical, political, economic, and social consequences of “that day” - of the most audacious attack on American territory - and the forces that were unleashed thereafter.
Uday Bhaskar interviews Madhavan Palat on 20 Years after 9/11
Mass killings by US forces after 9/11 boosted support for the Taliban
While President Joe Biden’s withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan may suggest a closure of the American war on “global terror”, in almost every sense, almost everywhere, we are living in a different, more “precarious” world. As the celebrated philosopher Judith Butler reminded us in a series of controversial essays after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a collective sense of vulnerability and mourning could have led to a deeper sense of solidarity and the search for global justice, had certain policy choices been made…
P B Mehta: What 9/11 unleashed on us
The unprecedented acts
of terror on 9/11, when death literally fell from the sky, were ostensibly
motivated by an impulse to revenge and restoration. The perpetrators who
carried it out sought to teach a lesson to the West, and re-position their
version of Islam as a powerful political force. But like a blast whose
reverberations fly in all directions, the deepest impulses behind the attack
were less strategic and more apocalyptic. They set in motion two crises that
are still with us.
The first was the
crisis of the West. It is often said that more than 9/11, it was the
overreaction and response to 9/11 that shaped its meaning. There is a great
deal of truth to that: 9/11 became the pretext to start two wars, put in motion
the perpetual war machine, legitimise unaccountable exercise of executive
power, institute the surveillance state, provide mendacious justifications for
torture and reinstate the idea that civilian casualties could be counted as
mere collateral damage….
Ben Rhodes: Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal has finally ended the 9/11 era
Foreign policy, for
better or worse, is always an extension of a nation’s domestic politics. The
arc of America’s war in Afghanistan is a
testament to this reality – the story of a superpower that overreached, slowly
came to terms with the limits of its capacity to shape events abroad, and
withdrew in the wake of raging dysfunction at home. Viewed through this prism,
President Joe Biden’s decisive yet chaotic withdrawal comes into focus.
The story begins with trauma and hubris. On September 11 2001, American power was at its high-water mark. The globalisation of open markets, democratic governance, and the US-led international order had shaped the previous decade. The spectre of nuclear war had been lifted, the ideological debates of the 20th century settled. To Americans, mass violence was something that took place along the periphery of the post-cold war world. And then suddenly, the periphery struck the centres of American power, killing thousands….
Chris
Hedges: The Collective Suicide Machine
Book review: AFGHANISTAN: ‘A SHOCKING INDICTMENT’
The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan: Interview with Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
Vanessa Thorpe: MI 6, the
coup in Iran that changed the Middle East, and the cover-up
Victor Jara murder:
ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
Andrew Bacevich: High Crimes
and Misdemeanors of the Fading American Century
Mohammed Hanif: The rest of
the world has had it with US presidents, Trump or otherwise
Donald Trump's gift to
America: Realizing we've never been a liberal democracy. By PAUL ROSENBERG
Zack Stanton: Violent
Christian Extremism in the USA
