11 years on from 9/11: what progress?
Professor Greg Barton
by Professor Greg Barton
The day will come when 11 September is just another date on the calendar. But that time is still some way off.
Eleven years on from 11 September 2001 the horrible spectacle of the World Trade Centre towers being struck by two 767 airliners and then collapsing into nothingness, continues to capture our imagination like a fragment from a recurring nightmare.
Almost 3000 lives were lost that day. Had it stopped there we would by now have begun to move on and have rejected as mere hubris the claim that 9/11 changed everything. Sadly the lives lost that day were just the beginning.
The consequences of the 9/11 attacks, and our reactions to them, continue to ripple through communities around the world. Diligent intelligence work has helped prevent further attacks in the US and thwarted numerous attempted attacks across the UK, Europe and even Australia. But Al Qaeda (and their ideas) have not gone away and lives continue to be lost at an alarming rate. The magnitude of this is often lost on us because, whilst the West has been scarred by terrorism, the vast majority of victims are Muslims.
Twelve months ago, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a degree of cautious optimism was palpable. This week that optimism has faded somewhat. Just this past weekend we had the disturbing but all-too-familiar news of a suicide bombing in Kabul, this time a 14-year-old boy killing himself and half a dozen other children outside the NATO headquarters. Analysts link this attack with the infamous Haqqani Network.
The news comes just as the US government has announced that it is proscribing the Haqqani Network. Having wrestled with a difficult decision over the past two years, it has decided to tackle this erstwhile ally of the Pakistani military head-on. If US relations with Pakistan were not already so abysmally poor - having sunk to a new low in the wake of the covert strike on Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad - then this development might have been deeply destabilising.
Al Qaeda in Pakistan - the core of the old Al Qaeda leadership - has been greatly weakened. But the fact that it appears to have been actively assisted by the Haqqani Network means that Al Qaeda's legacy and enduring influence in both Pakistan and Afghanistan is enormous.
At the same time, what little optimism there was about the future of Afghanistan has largely evaporated over the past 12 months.
The US and its allies launched strikes against the Al Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan immediately after the 9/11 attacks. This was understandable, and arguably unavoidable. Nevertheless the consequences have been tragic. Eleven years on we are still in Afghanistan looking at an exit but with little confidence of being able to achieve the stable, safe future for Afghanistan that was the pretext for being there.
One of the reasons why the Afghanistan operation has been so disappointingly ineffective is that the resources and attention that it deserved were siphoned off for operations in Iraq. The 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation was effective in toppling the regime of Saddam Hussain but, like in Afghanistan, it remains even now unclear whether all the sacrifice has achieved a lasting good. This gloomy prognosis was reinforced over the weekend with news of waves of coordinated suicide bombing attacks on a massive scale.
The situation in Iraq is somewhat better than the situation in Afghanistan, but it is still plagued by a violent insurgency which is now directly connected to Al Qaeda. Indeed Al Qaeda in Iraq has gone from being nonexistent in 2003 to being more powerful than Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was in 2001. Analysts hold grave fears that Al Qaeda in Iraq will play an increasingly prominent role in the unrest in Syria.
How much of this can be blamed on misguided responses to the outrage of 9/11? At the very least there is growing consensus that the invasion of Iraq was a grave strategic mistake. Terrorism works through asymmetrical force. It is less concerned with violence and terror for its own stake than it is in provoking an angry response.
It is clear that Al Qaeda intended to provoke America and its allies into going into Afghanistan. It seems likely that even Al Qaeda didn't anticipate the invasion of Iraq. However, that invasion gave Al Qaeda a foothold in the territory where it previously had virtually no presence. It also drained the military, financial, moral and political resources of the Western powers who were caught up in the joint military operation.
Just as importantly it also had a devastating effect on Western soft power. There was great sympathy across the Muslim world for the US in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist strike. Social attitude polling tells us that positive sentiment towards America and its allies plummeted precipitously following the invasion of Iraq in April 2003. Al Qaeda and its allies and fellow travellers have drawn tremendous energy and support from resentment at occupation and military strikes.
So are we safer 11 years on from 9/11? Much has been achieved, most of it not by military means but by intelligence and by cooperation with vulnerable communities. Nevertheless, it is very hard to say with any certainty that we are safer. This was brought home by the director of ASIO, David Irvine, in a public statement last week at security conference in Canberra. He spoke frankly about the capacity of the international movements mentioned above to inspire responses even in remote and comfortable Australia.
It is not that Muslim communities as a whole are particularly vulnerable in Australia. Rather, instruments of globalisation – cheap international travel and the unfettered movement of ideas – even in stable communities, allow individuals to be drawn into dangerous relationships.
Are we safer? What we can say with certainty is that the threat of terrorism is persistent. Have we made mistakes? Certainly. Many things have been done right but serious mistakes have also been made. What is important now is that we learn from them and don't repeat them. This is particularly pertinent to the situation in Syria but more broadly reminds us of the importance with working with communities building genuine trust at home and across the world and recognising that future threats will not be contained to any single religious tradition or community.
One positive note amidst all this bad news is that Australia and our immediate neighbourhood of South-East Asia has seen substantial progress in dealing with the threat of terrorism and violent extremism. Next month sees another milestone anniversary as we reflect on what has happened in the ten years since the bombings in Bali on October 12 that took 202 lives, 88 of them Australian.
In the wake of the Bali bombing and the revelation of a very serious problem with Al Qaeda-style terrorism, South-East Asia came to be described as Al Qaeda's 'second front'. Today the situation is much better, in large part due to the rapidly developed capacity of the Indonesian police to deal with the threat.
More than 700 people have been arrested in the ten years since Bali and more than 600 have been successfully prosecuted in relatively open and transparent court cases. The threat of large-scale attacks of the kind seen in Bali in 2002, and less successfully attempted three times in Jakarta, has been substantially diminished.
Nevertheless, the news over the past week of two separate bomb-making workshops being discovered in suburban Jakarta, one with a substantial cache of weapons, is a reminder of the resilient and persistent nature of the terrorism threat. It is for this reason that the Indonesian authorities are increasingly turning their attention to a more holistic approach to countering violent extremism.
Greg Barton is the Herb Feith Research Professor for the School of Political and Social Inquiry in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University.
The Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash will be wrestling with these issues at a major international conference at the end of September. "Terrorism and Counter-terrorism in Australia and Indonesia: 10 years after Bali" will take place on 26 - 28 September at the Monash University Law Chambers, 555 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne.