NEVER before in the annals of world history has life imitated the surreal with such macabre and horrifying effect as the events of Black Tuesday unfolded across television screens the world over. Images of the death and destruction that engulfed New York and Washington DC became a bewildering mix of fact and fiction. Was the picture of the second aircraft that slammed into the Word Trade Centre real or some kind of hi-tech computer simulation?
But the truth that was embedded in the yet to be cleared debris and rubble told a different truth - this was frighteningly real. Terrorism, once identified with impoverished Third World communities locked in internecine strife had actually struck at the core of US symbols of power - both economic and military. What is it about Black Tuesday that makes it such a significant punctuation in the post Cold War global security discourse? At one level the scale of human loss may yet not be unprecedented. While one empathises deeply with the victims of what has happened on September 11, human casualty figures in the thousands can be recalled in recent years from dark Africa to parts of Asia and Europe and there was scarcely the kind of convulsion in the global consciousness that one witnesses now.
Perhaps one could ascribe the outrage to the temporal density of the tragedy, in the sense that the entire 'clip' lasted a mere two hours. >From 8.40 a.m when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Tower, till 10.38 a.m when the entire structure collapsed in full view of the millions who constituted an aghast global community.
Investigations are still underway and the speculation continues about the identity of the likely perpetrators of this crime - nay, war against not just the USA but all of civilised humanity. The finger of suspicion has been pointed at the usual suspects - some by name such as bin Laden, and some by group affiliation like the Al Qaiada among others - but prudence warrants that we wait till the investigations are fully completed and both emotion and certitude be kept on hold.
In the interim what emerges is the reiteration of an oft-repeated truism that had its genesis in the Cold War - namely that the security of the global community is indivisible and that there can be no sectarian interpretation of this whether along the East/West or North /South axis. This is more relevant and true now than ever before. Till recently there was a sense that 'security' was a purely military related issue and that in the aftermath of the Cold War the world was being divided into the affluent zone of peace and prosperity on the one hand, and the zones of poverty and turbulence on the other. This was the North/South division and it seemed that Fortress America led the citadel of the affluent western democracies plus aspirants such as Japan and other parts of the Asia-Pacific in the final phase of abiding economic growth indices and higher degrees of affluence and technological marvels.
September 11 has put paid to such assertions and global military security from weapons of mass destruction to low intensity conflict has become one hugely intricate and maddeningly complex labyrinth. The interlinkages straddle the political, economic, technological and societal strands of the post Cold War grapple which in itself is fiercely contested both within and among states and society. Thus no part of the globe is now immune to the forces of destabilisation and non-state violence that were nurtured, perhaps inadvertently, in the Cold War wherein religious fervour was empowered with the Kalashnikov and narcotic funding as part of a larger strategy.
The time has come to carry out a dispassionate review of these terrorist patterns and linkages and expose the nodes that are nurturing this kind of irrationality, which at one level is hugely professional and successful in its objectives.
It would not be appropriate to indict
either Pakistan or Afghanistan in the absence of more concrete proof linking
them or their citizens with the events of Black Tuesday but to suggest
that state elite and civil society will have a special cross to bear in
the new war against terrorism whatever be its hue and provenance - from
distant New York and Washington to the Kashmir valley where a different
kind of intimidation is at play. The battle against terrorism may have
just begun even as we wait for the contours of the immediate tragedy to
reveal themselves.