What remains of September 11th?
Because 9/11 is still an open wound. The Scratches of Damato
Once again in its 50 years of life, the newspaper il manifesto , while still proudly communist despite the overt failure of the ideology it inspires, has been more happily able than many other newspapers to represent with its cover title the sentiment that is generally felt of facing an event such as the twentieth anniversary of the terrorist assault on the twin towers in New York. The killing of which, with all the deaths it caused and those that still would have caused the reaction war on Afghanistan conducted by the Americans and their allies, is still and certainly an "open wound", as the title of the manifesto says. And this even if in the meantime the war on Afghanistan ended, at least formally, with the withdrawal of the occupation troops, which continued even after the revenge carried out with the physical elimination of those who ordered the massacre in the United States from which it all originated.
To help keep that wound open – tragically open – certainly contributed to the modalities of the withdrawal of the occupation troops and the too many civilian hostages remained practically, with their lack of escape, in the hands of the Taliban, who enthusiastically returned to power as in a walk, arming themselves with abundant and sophisticated means that the Americans left behind, or the local troops they were destined for abandoned deserting.
"We have been dreaming of this moment for twenty years," said a Taliban to the correspondent of Il Foglio Daniele Ranieri in the large former American base between Jalalabard and the Pakistani border, overturning today's celebrations in New York and in every other part of the West and of the world who recognized themselves on 11 September 2001 as the victims of Muslim terrorism. And I challenge anyone to seriously challenge this definition, given that more or less moderate Islamism has not managed to defeat it, and has often even given the impression of not even wanting to fight it so strongly and vigorously.
The impudence of that Taliban helped to emphasize the reporter for Il Foglio "the crumbling power of this military defeat" of the West. And to make him write that "if after just twenty years the Taliban control much more territory in Afghanistan than they did in 2001 (indeed: they control everything), it means that the reaction of the United States to the attacks of 11 September has not worked. The long-term vision of the Taliban was more realistic ”.
Yet Ranieri himself closed his report by writing: "The Taliban have become a government and must keep under control other extremists who contest them on the doctrinal level", even if they have already exceeded the doctrine with the attacks carried out during the evacuation of the Western troops and fleeing Afghans. But in addition to the "doctrinal" extremists, as the reporter for Il Foglio optimistically calls them, the Taliban who have returned to power must now deal with a population that is not supine as it was twenty years ago under their orders. In my opinion, Nadia Urbinati was not wrong to write an editorial in Domani on the "road to freedom", however started, so proudly entitled, not only feminist: "Women's activism is the real barrier to the Taliban".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/11-settembre-cosa-resta/ on Sat, 11 Sep 2021 06:08:42 +0000.