September 11: for the United States, twenty years of headlong rush

America mourns its dead, Afghans suffer and the Taliban rule. So many things have 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 snatched 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 areas of daily life contaminated by the obsession with security born on this tragic Indian summer Tuesday. In Kabul, on the other hand, the present has the bitter taste of a return to square one. In a lesson in patience and tenacity that we would find formidable if it were not about them, the Taliban once again preside over the destinies of Afghanistan, abandoned in chaos, in an assumed and thoughtful way, by Washington .

When commemorating, in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, the twentieth anniversary of the attacks, Joe Biden will undoubtedly have a thought, a word, a prayer perhaps, for the Afghan girls and women back under the yoke. obscurantist. This will be of no comfort to them and the essential, for the democrat, is in any case elsewhere. 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 hesitate. And this Saturday, he will try to pose as president of a people united by memory and mourning, if not by anything else.

For Americans, the memories of the September 11 attacks remain intact, as indelible as the wound 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, flabbergasted and helpless, prostrate or – already – enraged, the images of the World Trade Center on fire, the scars of the Boeing 767 in its glass facades, the black smoke splitting the immaculate blue sky of Manhattan then the unthinkable collapse of the two towers, twenty-nine minutes apart? They are 93%, among those aged at least 10 years old at the time, to remember it “precisely”, according to a survey carried out at the end of August by the Pew Research Center. Rare hyphen in a nation today sick of its fractures and its disagreements including memorials.

collective anxiety

As for the youngest and some 70 million Americans born since September 11, 2001, they may have grown up without precise memories, but they have not escaped national, patriotic and warlike mourning, and a form of collective anguish. arose that day. This 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, businessmen and women, military and federal workers, mothers and fathers, friends and neighbours", promising to do them "justice" and urging his fellow citizens to pray for “the children whose world was shattered”. Like a distant echo, reporter Andrew Boryga, a young schoolboy from the Bronx at the time, wrote a few days ago in the Washington Post: "The psychological effect of seeing your country attacked at a young age can be expressed in very different 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, the date on which the United States faltered, and the world with them? An eternal pain first, in the eyes of Americans. “The past twenty years have taught us that time does not heal all wounds. Time, in reality, is just passing, ”explains Professor Sally Karioth, specialist in psychotraumatology. She notably accompanied survivors of the attack on the Pentagon and children who had lost a parent at the World Trade Center. Symbol of this still gaping wound, more than 1,100 victims of the attacks in New York remain to be formally identified. Two were found just a few days ago, thanks to new DNA sequencing technology. The majority never will. "Grief, loss and trauma have forever marked our personal stories," continues Sally Karioth. This pivotal moment in the march of the world has become, forever, a collective burden.

Collective burden

Inflicted by al-Qaeda after years of careful preparation, this burden, which even Hollywood would have dared not imagine, has derailed America. The symbol of its financial supremacy and the headquarters of its military power were struck. The response was all the more brutal. Now Washington's avenging arm is falling – sometimes with the help of its allies – and the American burden is becoming global. America projects its brute force without considering the consequences. The war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, that of Iraq on March 20, 2003. The first ended a few weeks ago, with as an epilogue a frenetic airlift and bereaved by yet another attack at the gates of the Kabul airport (more than a hundred dead, including 13 American soldiers).

Since then, the Taliban have announced their new interim government. Those who hoped they had moderated 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 at: 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 on a bounty by the FBI and leader of the Haqqani network. This group interfaces with Al Qaeda in the region and has committed or ordered the bloodiest attacks that have hit Kabul in the past fifteen years.

Afghanistan: the Haqqani, dynasty of terror

It took barely three weeks for the Taliban to begin painting the concrete walls erected by NATO forces and the Afghan authorities in the capital with their slogans: "We have conquered Afghanistan and defeated the Americans with help of God" or "The Koran is the law". And to reimpose their order by force, screaming and beating with sticks and plastic pipes the few women who dare to protest in the street. An underground Kabul has taken shape, filled with those who are afraid, hide, and no longer come out into the streets. It continues to expand as evidence emerges: the Taliban have not changed. The country is dark. According to the United Nations Development Program, 97% of people are likely to have 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 and then in collective memory,” Vietnamese-American novelist and former refugee Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote in 2016. On that of Iraq, triggered without evidence or strategy for the future and which created chaos conducive to the emergence of Daesh, collective memory has already formed a fairly clear-cut opinion. What about the Afghan case? Between the flash return to power of the Taliban and the humiliating departure of their own soldiers, the United States seems to have lost both the war of terrain and that of image. But, the academic Gus Martin, specialist in terrorism, nuance: “We intervened in Afghanistan to drive out Al-Qaeda and eliminate this threat. We can say that this mission was crowned with success when we killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. Maybe we should have declared our victory then and gone 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 has attempted to assess “the real costs” – human, fiscal and even environmental – of “post-9/11 wars”. Necessarily imperfect, the figures nonetheless remain staggering: 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.

Added to this is 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 prevent this light from shining”, proclaimed George W. Bush on the evening of September 11. But wounded in its pride, the so-called American "lighthouse" has above all shown its darkest side: secret CIA prisons, kidnappings and torture of prisoners, "enemy fighters" treated like beasts at the Guantánamo military camp and deprived , like the victims moreover, of a democratic justice. In twenty years, the United States has never succeeded in judging the masterminds 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 law, of democracy” according to François Hollande – recalled that another way was possible. Finally, how not to mention the innumerable excesses linked to the obsession with security? The sprawling Patriot Act, generalized mass surveillance, including that of the allies, in the name of the primacy of a “logic of suspicion”, summarizes Didier Bigo of the Center for International Research (Ceri).

September 11: twenty years later, a new world

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 early century also found itself weakened within its borders. Racial profiling, the outrageous militarization of the police forces or the “securing of the debate on immigration”, according to the expression of political scientist David Leblang, are all legacies of 9/11. Just like, writes Douglas Kennedy, the election of Donald Trump, "a direct result of the xenophobic fear engendered by this monstrous attack".

Senator in 2001, also blinded by rage and the desire for revenge, Joe Biden had unflinchingly supported 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 risk of terrorism and more turned, he said last month, towards "the threats of 2021 and tomorrow". There is no shortage of these: 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 flaws of a once again weakened hyperpower. From this disaster, Joe Biden learned a major lesson: it is high time to do nation building. But this time, at home.