The Complex Emotions of 9/11
For me, 9/11 always brings up complex emotions. Yesterday, on its 20th anniversary, I inadvertently found myself in the blocks around Ground Zero in Manhattan. As I walked around, I thought about how this year felt particularly unsettling because of it coinciding with the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.
On Sept 11, 2001, I was a week into my first year at college in Boston. I'd never been to the US before. That morning I was late for my 9:30am class, and as I rushed across campus and barged into the lecture hall, I found it mostly empty. A large projected screen was showing live footage from the twin towers. I thought it was a movie. "Why are they playing this instead of having class?" I remember wondering as I walked out of the hall, confused. Of course, as I entered the lobby where students huddled around a TV screen, it only took a few minutes to realize the horror of what had just happened.
I don't know what my college experience would've been like in a pre-9/11 world. I do know that as a Pakistani Muslim, I felt an overnight spotlight on my identity, my country, and my culture in a way I wasn't prepared for. As one of two Pakistanis admitted that year, I had to represent. I also know that the way I experienced 9/11 itself while in Boston — with real-life connections to people affected by the event — was different than how I would have from Lahore: on my TV screen. For the next 10 years I lived in the US, but frequent trips to Pakistan reminded me that I was now part of two worlds that looked at each other with suspicion, anger and animosity.
In spring of 2011, I moved back to Pakistan.
Two months later OBL was captured in Abbotabad, where I had spent 6 years of my childhood and gone to elementary school. The next few years were among the most unstable for Pakistan—violence spread to major cities, including my hometown Lahore, which had never directly experienced it at that scale before. In 2014, in a show of resistance against the state and military, six gunmen associated with the TTP (a.k.a. the Pakistani Taliban) killed 132 school children in Peshawar, in one of the world's deadliest school massacres. I remember it as one of the darkest days in the country's history.
And now, it's 2021. I've just moved again to the US, to New York City.
And the Taliban have announced an interim government in Afghanistan. I have been gripped by an overwhelming despair and hopelessness this month watching the US withdrawal play out. As Afghans are displaced for a second time, it seems we have learned little in 40 years. In 1989, the conclusion of the US engagement in Afghanistan after the Soviet army withdrew looked very similar to the present — marked by little concern for what was being left behind, and no effort to clean up the mess created by 10 years of war, resulting in the almost-immediate eruption of a civil war, and a Taliban takeover in 1996.
To now see history repeat itself so strikingly is deeply disappointing.
9/11 itself could have been a moment of reflection on imperialism and proxy wars, on the history leading up to that horrific moment, instead of the knee-jerk, emotional, vengeful, aggressive military response of the Bush administration. Not only did the War on Terror fail to control terrorism, it gave us more war, more terror and more militarization. It gave us loss of civil liberties, domestic spying, extrajudicial killings, and torture. Authoritarian and fascist leaders, and nativist ideologies have gained popularity and power around the world. In 2001, we had Al-Qaeda. Today, we have too many terrorist organizations and factions to list here.
Working with Afghan refugee communities in Attock was my inspiration for moving back to Pakistan in 2011. It was also my first close, meaningful awakening to the racism, vilification, dehumanization and systemic discrimination Afghans faced (and still face) in Pakistan. Newsreels from the past few weeks have been a tragic reminder of how the world is still unable to see the people of Afghanistan in their full humanity and complexity. The long arc of Afghanistan's 40 year history — as a battleground for the proxy wars of powerful countries — is lost as we focus on this moment in time: a moment that will be lost in another few months as the world moves on to something else.
I also shudder at the profound implications of this for Pakistan, which in the last 20 years has had to grapple with the rise of dozens of franchises and flavors of terrorist networks within its borders, as well as the Swat Valley coming under Taliban control between 2004 and 2009. I am incredulous when I see the Pakistani government today talking about 'co-existing' with the Taliban, using words like inclusive about their governance plans. Images of the Taliban's meetings filled with men are triggering for me — a reminder of what Pakistan shares with its neighbor: an erasure of women from its public and leadership spaces. Pakistan's own current misogynistic, authoritarian government is connected to the political moment the region finds itself in. Space for dissent and free speech has heavily shrunk, making life particularly stifling for Pakistani women and minorities, and contributing to my own decision to move this year.
We got here as a result of thoughtless policy and governance from so many actors — American, Pakistani and Afghan leaders are all complicit. But the question is, who is thinking about what we do next? Will we let the past teach us how to build a world where there is less war and less terror? Or will we continue on the path of "us" vs. "them"?
