BEIRUT – It is impossible to make a single, broad assessment of the condition of the Middle East ten years after the 9/11 events and their aftermath, because the region is so fragmented into disparate and often contradictory groups of people, political power centers, and ideological forces. Also, the first nine years after 9/11 and the past year since December 2010 are distinctly different from each other. I experienced 9/11 and the 9 months afterwards in the United States, and have since been back in the Arab world for the past 9 years. I would suggest that any useful analysis of that criminal act and its aftermath must examine three dimensions in two different time frames.
The two different time frames are the decade leading to 9/11, and the decade after that date. The three critical dimensions that define the world in which Al-Qaeda was born are the Al-Qaeda terrorists and the extensive grievances in Middle Eastern societies that they draw on, the policies of Arab governments, and the policies of non-Arab states, especially the United States and Israel. These three dimensions weave into each other in a seamless web of action and reaction, attack and counter-attack, aggression and resistance that operate in both directions, i.e., in some cases Al-Qaeda or various non-violent or less violent groups in the Arab-Asian region feel they are fighting back against Arab, Israeli and American government policies, and in other cases the governments see themselves fighting to rid the world of the scourge of terror.
The important factor that seems to me to remain elusive in the world of most analysts and governments is that the criminal terror act of 9/11, despicable as it was, did not emanate from a vacuum. It was part of a cycle of policies and attitudes by various actors in the Middle East that spawned this and other terrorist movements. This does not detract from the criminal nature of the 9/11 and other such terror acts; but it helps us understand their lineage, which is critical for taking action to stop such acts from recurring. Because they ignored this pivotal cycle of policies, reactions and attitudes, the responses to 9/11 in the United States and the Middle East probably exacerbated rather than improved the underlying poor quality of governance and citizen rights that had contributed in the first place to the rise of domestic discontent and opposition to foreign occupation that led to the birth of Al-Qaeda and other movements like it.
The biggest policy failure in the response to 9/11 in the West and the Middle East was the inability or unwillingness of governments to analyze Al-Qaeda terror in its full context for what it really was: a small fringe movement – a violent, marginal cult on the run – that consistently failed to resonate with publics across the Arab-Asian region, but that exploited widely held grievances against Arab and Asian governments and the foreign policies of the United States and Israel. Most significantly in my view, the United States refused to acknowledge the central awkward reality that Al-Qaeda and other such fundamentalist militant groups were largely born in Arab jails in countries that the United States saw as its closest allies, such as Jordan and Egypt (i.e., the radicalization of Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Abu Mus’ab el-Zarqawi, among many others).
The exaggerated, security- and war-dominated, American-led over-reaction to 9/11 led to two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and increased political and technical support to Arab security services – exactly the two phenomena that led to the birth and growth of Al-Qaeda in the first place. It is important to recall that a foreign military presence in “sacred” Islamic soil twice before fuelled critical periods of Al-Qaeda’s birth and expansion: first when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, and second when the US remained in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Gulf war against Iraq. So sending in the troops post-9/11 was a sure-fire recipe for stoking the fires of resistance against foreign occupiers of Islamic realms that were such successful recruiting themes for Al-Qaeda.
The American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the allied security policies in the Arab-Asian region after 9/11 resulted in a series of trends that were detrimental to the wellbeing of most societies in our region. The most obvious were: The wars and security policies fuelled intense new opposition to Washington’s policies in the region, and thus generated serious new tensions between Arab public opinion and Arab governments that were already deeply opposed on many issues; they catalyzed an entire new generation of perhaps thousands of radical militants and terrorists who fanned out from Iraq and Afghanistan to attack targets and destabilize societies across the Arab-Asian region; they provided opening for extremists like Al-Qaeda affiliate Abu Mus’ab el-Zarqawi to sow Shiite-Sunni tensions in Iraq, which quickly spread to other parts of the region; they enhanced many Arab governments’ focus on severe domestic security measures that further irritated their own disenchanted and politically degraded citizens, and thus delayed any transition to democratic rule and accountable good governance; they diverted resources to militarism that should have gone to socio-economic development; and they distracted from the centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a leading and persistent source of discontent and radicalization among public across the region.
The successes in disrupting Al-Qaeda operations and killing or capturing some of its key personnel certainly have made it more difficult for the organization to carry out planned attacks, but this has had the effect in part of decentralizing the operation and perhaps leading to the growth of smaller copy-cat groups. The decade since the 9/11 attack has seen some limited successes in disrupting terror networks, but more widely it has aggravated the underlying socio-economic, political and foreign military occupation conditions that stoked the growth of Al-Qaeda and other such groups.
The dramatic counter-point to Al-Qaeda terror was not American-led militarism since 2001, but rather the populist revolutions that have swept through half a dozen Arab states since December 2010. If those revolutions achieve more democratic governance with a focus on greater social justice and equity, and true national sovereignty, they are likely to be the key to wiping away the scourge of Al-Qaeda-like terrorism that has only persisted and even expanded since 9/11.
Rami G. Khouri is the Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.
