By JOHN JENKINS
There has been a vogue recently to take some particular year, call it “the year that changed X” and produce a book or a documentary about it. These range from the mostly very bad (“1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything” — spoiler alert: It didn’t) to the rare piece of excellence (Kim Ghattas’ “Black Wave,” about the profound long-term impact of 1979 — the Iranian Revolution, Juhayman Al-Otaibi, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan).
I have a sneaking sympathy with the desire to pin down moments when the zeitgeist shifted. After all, some events are so striking or devastating that they do indeed seem to derail history. Nearly 60 years on, I can still remember the first black and white pictures of the John F. Kennedy assassination in Dallas flickering across the small screen of our television set in the English Midlands on a cold November day in 1963. The same with the 1969 moon landing. I imagine the Ides of March in 44 B.C. was indelibly printed on the minds of politically aware Romans. And, in all his long years of exile in New York and Stanford, I don’t suppose Alexander Kerensky ever forgot the storming of St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace on Nov. 7, 1917.
But mostly this is a convenient and sometimes lazy trope that can obscure the much longer and more complex trains of events that produce historical change. The Kennedy assassination was the product of the Cold War and two decades of increasingly polarized and sometimes paranoid politics in the US and was itself only the first of three violent deaths in the 1960s that changed America. Julius Caesar didn’t die because of what he’d done that month: He was killed for the same reason as the two Gracchi brothers some 70 years earlier — they promoted populist reforms that threatened oligarchic rule. And, in truth, the collapse of the Roman Republic was a long time coming. Even the storm of 1979 had been sown long beforehand in the radical study circles of Tehran, Qom and Najaf, Makkah and Madinah, and Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta.
And we should have seen 9/11 coming too. Osama bin Laden had already announced his intentions with attacks in East Africa and Yemen. He had made plain his absolute hostility to the US in particular, to the infidel West in general, and to all Arab states and governments that refused to accept his impossibly absolutist demands. He drew on ideas that had been brewing inside Islamist movements for half a century and more — shaped into a destructive ideology and forged into a weapon of revolutionary action by, among others, Abul A’la Al-Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri, Omar Abdel-Rahman and their followers. We simply failed to pay attention — and, by “we,” I mean all of us. Killun ya’ni killun (all means all).
So 9/11 was an alarm call. It had been planned by Al-Qaeda from its haven inside Afghanistan, which had become a magnet for global extremism in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the destructive wars in Chechnya and the Balkans. The Taliban regime, which had emerged out of the Deobandi madrasas of Pakistan, rejected all appeals to dissociate themselves from Al-Qaeda and hand over Bin Laden. Their refusal led to their destruction. But now they’re back — and gleefully celebrating, along with fellow Sunni Islamists across the world (and some in the Pakistani government), what they see as the defeat of another superpower, this time the US, along with its Western allies.
Has nothing changed? Or has everything changed?
Before we answer that question, there are two other events of the last 20 years we need to consider. The first was the global financial crash of 2007. The second is the COVID-19 pandemic. And then, into the interstices of this framework, we need to weave the rise of China and its turn to a form of personalized authoritarianism that we have not seen since Chairman Mao; the technological revolution in warfare, where unmanned aerial vehicles, cyber and other highly destructive but relatively cheap offensive weapons have transformed the balance of threat; the failure of US and European efforts to build a new state on the ruins of catastrophe in Iraq; the migration crisis in the Mediterranean after 2011 in the aftermath of the almost equally destructive Arab Spring; and the rise of highly polarized sociocultural politics in the US and Europe.
The year 2000 was, in some ways, the high-water mark of the Western-made post-1945 world order. The US and its allies had won the Cold War, Russia under Boris Yeltsin seemed to wish to be cooperative, the Balkan Wars had been ended and the Oslo peace process looked as if it was only a negotiating whisker away from ultimate success. The global economy was booming, with millions lifted out of poverty every year, demonstrating the ultimate power of the Washington Consensus. The EU was on the verge of a major expansion eastward. And the mandarins of Brussels looked forward to an accelerating, if necessarily discreet, integration of EU nation states into a modern version of the Carolingian Empire under the intellectual guidance not of Alcuin of York but the technocrats of the Berlaymont.
Then it all went wrong. Some of this was undoubtedly the result of Western hubris. The invasion of Afghanistan was entirely justified. The Taliban had allowed Afghan soil to be used to prepare an assault upon the American homeland: It was an act of war they refused to denounce. Dealing with Al-Qaeda was an imperative. But the invasion of Iraq was a catastrophe — and an entirely unnecessary distraction. It also cost the US alone more than $2 trillion, which, when added to the price of Afghanistan, imposed a massively unproductive burden on the US economy. –AN
