America mourns its dead, the Afghans suffer and the Taliban rule. So much has changed in twenty years, and so little at the same time. From the planetary shock of September 11, 2001, the conviction quickly emerged that nothing would ever be the same again. This is true in Manhattan where the Twin Towers, an architectural feat torn from New Yorkers, have given way to two huge pools honoring the deceased. Also true on the Internet, on our smartphones or in the way we travel, so many fields of daily life contaminated by the obsession with security born on this tragic Tuesday of Indian summer. In Kabul, on the other hand, the present has the bitter taste of returning to square one. In a lesson of patience and tenacity that we would find formidable if it were not for them, the Taliban once again presides over the destinies of Afghanistan, abandoned in chaos, in a assumed and thoughtful way, by Washington .
As we commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the attacks in New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania, Joe Biden will no doubt have a thought, a word, a prayer perhaps, for the Afghan girls and women back under the yoke. obscurantist. This will not be of any comfort to them and the main thing, for the Democrat, is elsewhere anyway. Like Barack Obama and Donald Trump before him, he wanted to turn the page, that of the longest war in the history of the United States. That, too, of the exorbitant “War on terror” launched by George W. Bush in 2001. Biden had promised it, he did not procrastinate. And this Saturday, he will try to pose as president of a people united by memory and mourning, failing to be so by anything else.
For Americans, the memories of the September 11 attacks remain intact, as indelible as the injury itself, the worst ever inflicted on their country by a terrorist group. Where were they? What were they doing when they heard the news and then discovered live, stunned and helpless, prostrate or – already – enraged, the images of the World Trade Center on fire, the stigmata of the Boeing 767s in its glass facades, the black smoke slicing through Manhattan’s pristine blue sky and then the unthinkable collapse of the two towers, twenty-nine minutes apart? 93% of those aged 10 or older at the time remembered “precisely”, according to one survey carried out at the end of August by the Pew Research Center. Rare link in a nation today sick with its fractures and its disagreements, including memorials.
Collective anguish
As for the youngest and some 70 million Americans born since September 11, 2001, they may have grown up without specific memories, they have not escaped national, patriotic and bellicose mourning, and a form of collective anguish. arose that day. That day when their country, hyperpower of a unipolar world, lost forever and in a few minutes part of its tranquility and nearly 3,000 lives. That same evening, President George W. Bush paid tribute to these “Secretaries, businesswomen and men, military and federal workers, mothers and fathers, friends and neighbors”, promising to give them back «justice» and urging his fellow citizens to pray for “The children whose world is shattered”. Like a distant echo, reporter Andrew Boryga, a young Bronx schoolboy at the time, wrote a few days ago in the Washington Post : “The psychological effect of seeing one’s country attacked at a young age can be expressed in very different ways for everyone as the years go by. But he never left me, and I don’t think he ever left my generation either. “
So what remains of September 11, when the United States faltered, and the world with them? First of all, eternal pain in the eyes of Americans. “The past 20 years have taught us that time does not heal all wounds. Time, in reality, is just passing ”, writes Professor Sally Karioth, specialist in psychotraumatology. She notably accompanied survivors of the attack on the Pentagon and children who lost a parent at the World Trade Center. Symbol of this still gaping wound, more than 1,100 victims of the New York attacks remain to be formally identified. Two were released just a few days ago, thanks to new DNA sequencing technology. The majority will never be. “Grief, loss and trauma have forever marked our personal stories, continued Sally Karioth. This pivotal moment in the course of the world has become, forever, a collective burden. ”
Collective burden
Inflicted by Al-Qaeda after years of painstaking preparation, this burden, which even Hollywood could not have imagined, has derailed America. The symbol of its financial supremacy and the headquarters of its military might have been struck. The response was all the more brutal. Now the avenging arm of Washington descends – sometimes with the help of its allies – and the American burden becomes global. America projects its brute force without thinking about the consequences. The war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, that in Iraq on March 20, 2003. The first one ended a few weeks ago, with the epilogue of a frenzied airlift and bereaved by yet another attack at the gates of the Kabul airport (more than a hundred dead, including 13 American soldiers).
The Taliban have since announced their new interim government. Those who hoped that they had moderated themselves into some kind of version 2.0 after their first exercise of power between 1996 and 2001 were disillusioned. Their executive brings together part of the old guard, close to Mullah Omar with whom they founded the movement, passed through Guantánamo and on the UN blacklist. The youngest also have something to shudder: Mullah Yacoub, son of Mullah Omar and leader of the organization’s military commission, or Sirajuddin Haqqani, current number 2 of the Taliban at the head put a price on the FBI and leader of the organization. Haqqani network. This group interfaces with Al Qaeda in the region and has committed or ordered the bloodiest attacks to hit Kabul in the past fifteen years.
It took barely three weeks for the Taliban to start repainting the concrete walls laid by NATO forces and Afghan authorities in the capital with their slogans: “We conquered Afghanistan and defeated the Americans with the help of God” Where “The Koran is the law”. And to reimpose their order by force, yelling and hitting with sticks and plastic pipes the few women who dare to protest in the street. An underground Kabul has been dug, filled with those who are afraid, hide, and no longer go out into the streets. It continues to expand as the evidence emerges: the Taliban have not changed. The country is dark. According to the United Nations Development Program, 97% of residents risk having less than a dollar a day – the poverty line – to survive by the middle of next year, compared to 72% today.
929,000 dead
“All wars are played out twice, first on the battlefield, then in collective memory”, wrote in 2016 the Vietnamese-American novelist and former refugee Viet Thanh Nguyen. On that of Iraq, unleashed without evidence or strategy for the future and which created chaos conducive to the emergence of Daesh, the collective memory has already formed a fairly clear-cut opinion. What will happen to the Afghan case? Between the flashback of the Taliban to power and the humiliating departure of its own soldiers, the United States seems to have lost both the field war and the image war. But, the academic Gus Martin, specialist in terrorism, nuances: “We intervened in Afghanistan to drive out Al-Qaeda and eliminate this threat. We can say that this mission was successful when we killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. Perhaps then we should have declared our victory and come home. ”
A professor at California State University, Martin also insists that the United States has been relatively spared from terrorism. “We expected more mass attacks. Since September 11, this has not happened in the United States, unlike in Europe – in Brussels, Paris, London… ”, details the expert, for whom the “Radicalized lone wolves” and the “Domestic terrorists” now constitute the “Main threat”. In the light of this absence of killings perpetrated on its soil by terrorists from abroad, the past two decades would therefore have made America safer. But at what cost ? Brown University attempted to assess “Real costs” – human, budgetary and even environmental – “Post-11/09 wars”. Obviously imperfect, the figures are nonetheless dizzying : more than 929,000 dead including 387,000 civilians, 38 million refugees and more than 8,000 billion dollars spent by Washington alone, including future care for veterans.
There is also the moral and democratic cost. “America has been targeted because we are the brightest beacon of freedom and opportunity in the world. No one will stop this light from shining ”, claimed George W. Bush on the evening of September 11th. But hurt in his pride, the so-called «phare» American especially showed its darker side: secret CIA prisons, kidnappings and torture of prisoners, “enemy combatants” treated like animals in the military camp of Guantánamo and deprived, like the victims elsewhere, of democratic justice . In twenty years, the United States has never succeeded in judging the brains of the attacks, some of which they have held since 2003. By a strange coincidence, the opening on Wednesday in Paris of the November 13 trial – “This demonstration of force of the law, of democracy” according to François Hollande – recalled that another way was possible. Finally, how can we not mention the countless excesses linked to the obsession with security? The sprawling Patriot Act, widespread mass surveillance, including that of the allies, in the name of the primacy of a “Logic of suspicion”, summarizes Didier Bigo of the International Research Center (Ceri).
A destabilizing force abroad and first and foremost in the Middle East, where its military adventurism upset fragile balances, fueled civil wars and created more jihadists than it eliminated, the America of this beginning of century has also found itself weakened within its borders. Racial profiling, the outrageous militarization of the police force or the “Securing the debate on immigration”, in the words of political scientist David Leblang, are all legacies of September 11. Just as, believes the writer Douglas Kennedy, the election of Donald Trump, “Direct result of the xenophobic fear generated by this monstrous attack”.
Senator in 2001, also blinded by rage and the desire for revenge, Joe Biden had supported without batting an eyelid the intervention in Afghanistan and then the war in Iraq. Twenty years later, he aspires to be the president of another America. An America less obsessed with the terrorist risk and more turned, he said last month, towards “The threats of 2021 and tomorrow”. These are not lacking: strategic competition with China, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. In full rebound, the latter has already caused 220 times more deaths in the United States than on September 11, while highlighting the social and health failings of a again weakened hyperpower. Joe Biden drew a major lesson from this disaster: it is high time to nation building. But this time at home.
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