Six Years On
Six years on from 9/11, and the main thing to report is that there is nothing to report. The newspapers are mercifully free of tearful tributes this time round, though I suspect that 2011 is going to see a whole new wave of hand-wringing. The only real news has been the re-emergence of Osama Bin Irrelevant in another of his Al-Jazeera video diaries.
On the other hand, flippancy aside, this has been a particularly bad year for Iraqi civilians, with the random violence surging out of control. Anyone who backs a withdrawal of US troops in the light of this fact is callous in the extreme, since in their absence the bombers will have a totally free reign to commit carnage. It's not about the right or wrong of the invasion any more: it's about the circumstances we have to deal with here and now.
And in Afghanistan, a stalemate appears to be emerging. As with all guerilla movements, the problem with fighting the Taliban is that you can't defeat them militarily. 'The Taliban' is just as nebulous a concept as 'Al Qaeda': in reality, it's a loosely-linked confederation of disparate groups that has no real central command that can opt to surrender or negotiate. For every dead Taliban, two more are growing up.
So it's an ambivalent stage in the GWOT, at which point things could go either way. The public are clearly tired of the shooting wars overseas, but fail to recognise that once in there's no easy way out. Meanwhile, what is never reported is the extent to which economic development is changing - or failing to change - the situation. The only way to defeat the extremists is by engendering long-term stability and prosperity, and that never makes the papers at all.
