9/11: Ten years on!

A decade ago, few could have thought that 19 little known Arabs could change the world as they did? Those 19 hijackers weren only responsible for 9/11, but arguably, also for the changing axis of power, as events unfolding in the following years revealed. Such is the power of contemporary globalisation that the bout between a state (the US) and the stateless (al-Qaeda) has come to affect the world at large, in a way never seen before. There is irony to the whole façade as well. In a sense - as Manfred Steger, former consultant on globalisation for the U.S. State Department argues - Americanisation or Mcdonaldisation under the garb of globalisation has created resentment and instilled fears in the hearts and minds of global populace - especially in the poor and oppressed Muslim world. In small, but increasing, and rapidly growing, number of pockets, the theme is to return to innocence. Fed up with excessive corporatisation, mass level assembly line production and the works, the resentment against globalisation has given birth to ideas like localisation, sustainability, going green, organic and so forth. But terrorist activities, as Steger and other critics argue, is perhaps the poster child of the growing resentment against this one-sided globalisation. Yet, interestingly, the Jihadis have been using the weapons and technology built by the same people against whom they hold their angst. The globalisation of todays world is also visible in statelessness of ideas. As several terrorism observers have put it: al-Qaeda as an organisation may be at its end with the killing or capturing of top leaders this year; but al-Qaeda as an ideology lives on, via internet and satellite transmission, funded by crisscrossing of wire transfers across the world. Perhaps the most important find of the post mortem report of the 9/11 decade is that the US economy and its role and weight in the comity of nations, will never be the same. The 9/11 wars, that the US could have avoided according to onlookers like Noam Chomsky, have taken a toll on US economy. According to a recent study conducted by Brown University, the wars on terror played out in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan will ultimately cost between $3.2 trillion and $4 trillion. Thats nearly 22-28 percent of 2010 US GDP. Excluded in this number are federal obligations to care for past and future veterans of these wars that will likely total between $600 billion and $950 billion, according to the universitys projections. And "because the war has been financed almost entirely by borrowing, $185 billion in interest has already been paid on war spending, and another $1 trillion could accrue in interest alone through 2020," the university noted. Consequently, US government debt rose from 32 percent of GDP in 2011 to 67 percent in 2009. The growing global consensus that US economy will eventually go down on its knees is not only based on deregulation-led financial crisis and its aftermath, but also on the soaring cost of wars. Since the US spent its good years fighting the wars and raising debt, it failed to prepare an economic cushion to fall back on, when the bubble bursts. Ergo, the question is who is going to lead the world view and the supra national bodies like World Bank, United Nations etc, if and when the US economy crumbles. In this changing axis of power, the sooner the world finds a leader, the better.