Bitcoin has received and continues to receive a lot of fervent support.
Bitcoin fails as a currency, as an investment, as a store of value and as a hedge against inflation – all of which have been touted as unique selling points of this nascent piece of technology.
This mercurial nature of the digital coin is problematic given that for anything to be considered a currency it has to exist within certain bounds of stability.
This sounds like a fair argument until you run the numbers and realize that at higher levels of capitalization, Bitcoin’s volatility compounds.
This means that if you decide to buy a cup of coffee on the side of the road, you would have to wait a whole 10 minutes for the transaction to be completed.
Attempts have been made to resolve this problem without undermining the integrity of Bitcoin’s infrastructure under the “Lightning Network” project without any due success.
These citizens rely on Bitcoin for cross-border money transfers to avoid the high costs that come with such transactions, and also because most citizens of El Salvador, i.e.
Warren Buffet, one of Bitcoin’s biggest critics, weighed in on this saying, “If you buy something like Bitcoin, you don’t have anything that is producing anything.
A common rebuttal to this point by economic dilettantes is that the stock exchange might as well be considered a pyramid scheme because people buy low hoping to sell high to the next person.
More generally, a store of value is anything that retains purchasing power into the future.” In simple terms, a store of value is a place to safely put your wealth where it won’t depreciate.
Get this: on May 19th 2021, Bitcoin dropped by 31 per cent in a matter of hours after Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, publicly voiced his concerns over its enormous energy consumption levels.
What happens to investors’ wealth if a better alternative to Bitcoin materializes in the next 5 years? Evidently, redundancy is a real risk.
Bitcoin has also been presented as an all-encompassing solution to printer-happy governments notorious for increasing the general money supply whenever they feel like it.
While the attempts to end years of state-sanctioned madness are admirable, the notion that Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation is mostly false.
The half-truths and hive mind-set that has entrenched itself in the crypto space is to blame for this major lapse in judgement.
According to market predictions, Bitcoin is expected to hit the US$100,000 mark in the near future.
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Kudakwashe Tagwirei, who is close to Zimbabwe’s president and his inner circle, leveraged his privileged access to fuel and mining markets to strike a lucrative partnership with commodities giant Trafigura.
Public debt — much of it illegally accrued — has ballooned, a lack of foreign currency and fuel shortages continue to cripple the economy, and the value of Zimbabwe’s local currency has plummeted.
The turmoil has not been without its winners, though.
Under Mnangagwa’s reign, the businessman came to dominate Zimbabwe’s fuel, platinum, and gold sectors.
At least $3 billion in treasury bills issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe — which may have had no legal authority to do so — were awarded to Tagwirei’s group between 2017 and 2019, a parliamentary report said, with the group then funneling the windfall into a massive expansion that included a mining acquisition spree at bargain bin prices.
The presence of a handful of state officials in some of the network structures imply he is also a proxy for others.
Trafigura formed a joint venture with Tagwirei as far back as 2013 that gave the company priority access to the country’s fuel infrastructure and supply business through Tagwirei’s local influence.
OCCRP learned that Trafigura paid Tagwirei at least $100 million in fees through early 2018 for his help in creating a dominant position in the Zimbabwean fuel market.
In a response to OCCRP, a Trafigura spokesperson said, “Trafigura exited our business relationships with Mr Tagwirei in December 2019, prior to US sanctions being imposed, through the purchase of .
Century Towers, an imposing glass structure perched next to one of the capital’s main thoroughfares, houses the main office of Tagwirei’s holding company for his share of the joint venture, Sakunda Holdings Private Ltd, on several floors – including the 15th.
They agreed to form Sakunda Supplies, based in Zimbabwe, which would hand Trafigura a host of benefits, including preferential access to the crucial Beira pipeline from Mozambique.
“Sakunda – by which I mean just a few front guys under Tagwirei – were the political connections to the reserve bank, the president.
Meanwhile Trafigura Zimbabwe earned up to 40 percent gross profits for the supply of oil — all with sparse competition and all negotiated opaquely.
The interest if NOIC were to fail to pay its monthly obligation was a hefty 16 percent, which was to be compounded against the full outstanding sum, repayable immediately and in full.
Commodity trader prepayments to states and state-backed entities often feature deals based on political connections and lack a tender process, according to White.
The 2018 agreement specified a base monthly repayment of $5 million until April 2019 and $3.2 million from May 2019 until the total sum of $63.6 million was fully repaid.
According to an internal 2018 company report, Trafigura Zimbabwe was supplying up to 60 percent of Zimbabwe’s required monthly fuel imports.
“Red flags include the personal involvement of politically exposed individuals in such deals.
Reporters obtained internal emails discussing Tagwirei’s finances, which referenced an offshore account in Switzerland.
In addition to fees, Tagwirei received funds from Trafigura for “pipeline gain,” mineral deals, and project management, according to invoices obtained by OCCRP.
For transfers in the U.S., the recipient can be identified via the bank names and numbers of African banks where Tagwirei had an account, such as Zimbabwe’s Ecobank.
The Central Bank funded the program using Treasury Bills — a form of short-dated, government-backed security — that ended up creating billions of dollars of debt and draining foreign exchange reserves.
In March 2020, the company submitted documents to a Zimbabwean parliamentary committee that showed it charged fees of more than 30 percent on a $1 billion contract.
Sakunda was granted so-called T-Bills as a kind of collateral in case farmers in the program failed to repay their credit lines.
Rather than waiting to see how Command Agriculture played out, Sakunda quickly liquidated some Treasury Bills in Zimbabwe and sold others to Zimbabwean commercial banks at a discount.
In December 2019, Trafigura announced it had bought out Sakunda’s 51 percent stake in Trafigura Zimbabwe without disclosing the amount it had paid for the shares.
Even before Tagwirei and Sakunda were sanctioned by the U.S.
Prepayments worth $1.2 billion were again offered to NOIC, according to a contract between Sotic and Zimbabwe’s central bank governor on behalf of NOIC.
Under the Sotic-drafted contract terms, Sotic would source foreign exchange of up to $600 million on behalf of the Reserve Bank, with the rest in RTGS currency, a local pseudo-currency that doesn’t trade on international markets and whose exchange rate is artificially set by the government.
By July 3, 2019, a payment of just 814 million RTGS had been deposited by Tagwirei’s team into the Reserve Bank’s account — far short of the huge sums of foreign exchange required by the contract.
The email shows that a Sotic subsidiary sold a petroleum-based product to Sotic at $590 per metric tonne.
Tagwirei’s businesses appeared to involve President Mnangagwa, or “HE” , as he was sometimes referred to and other government officials.
Documents show Tagwirei’s company formation agent and administrator of his Mauritius companies described how he had to use his pre-existing relationship with the CEO of Mauritian bank AfrAsia to open an account there for Sotic because of the negative press Tagwirei was getting.
As the businesses were shuffled, so were the key figures in the network.
anti-corruption group The Sentry, and confirmed in documents and emails from May 2019, Zimbabwe’s central bank governor John Mangudya is named as the legal protector of Lighthouse Trust, a co-owner of Sotic at the time.
A legal protector is a person appointed to direct or restrain trustees in relation to their administration of a trust.
In an email to OCCRP, Mangudya claimed he was not part of the trust structures and was not aware his name had been listed as their legal protector.
In an email to OCCRP, former Sotic CEO David Brown claimed he had no involvement in transactions prior to June 2020 and therefore could not comment on irregularities pointed out by reporters.
A representative for Sincler and Behr said they had resigned all duties and were off the board of Sotic International as of June 2020.
When Sotic CEO at the time David Brown filed an application in South Africa’s high court to stop his predecessor Fourie from talking to the press, he included the full structure of Sotic’s corporate network.
With devolution, northern Kenya has become an important regional cultural hub, and cultural elders have acquired a new political salience.
These cultural reconnections are happening on a spatial-temporal scale, and old cultures have been revived and given a new role.
When Wabar Abdille Wabar Abdi, the 78-year-old king of the Degodia, visited Kenya for the first time in 2019, members of parliament and governors from the region ran around like zealous subalterns.
It was said that the late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died because he lied to Wabar Abdille Wabar Abdi, that his supernatural powers were not to be joked with.
Strong opinions were shared on social media, with allegations that the Jibrail had presented themselves as different from the saransoor, the larger Degodia ethnic cluster.
At the Abdalla Deyle clan coronation, Ahmed Abdullahi, the former governor for Wajir said, “I ask politicians like myself to give space to the cultural and religious leaders.
Another resident who spoke after him said, “Politicians have been blamed for disturbing the Ugaas and whatnot.
Each coronation that has taken place since the advent of devolution—there have been eight, three in Wajir in the last three months—represents a sentimental celebration of a bygone era.
The Sultan was projected as a “symbol of unity” who would “champion community interest,” “restore long lost glory,” “revive historical prowess.” And also play the political roles of negotiating for peace, vetting electoral candidates, bringing order to the council of elders, and representing clan interests in the political decision-making process.
In most cases, those anointed Sultan were former chiefs, sons of former chiefs, former councillors, shrewd businessmen, and retired teachers who had made at least one trip to Mecca and Medina.
The publicity around their coronation was a necessary public spectacle, designed to add substance, status and power to the anointed so that whomever they endorse is accepted without question.
Take, for example, the case of the Ajuran community who, in September 2021, threw a party in Nairobi to celebrate the Ajuran Empire, which reigned 500 years ago.
Then, even the Somalified Borana, like Hajj Galma Dida, the paramount chief who was killed by the Shifta, had been referred to as Sultan in letters to the British since it was a title that suggested status.
The revival of these traditional governance institutions is emerging while states in the Horn of Africa strive to bring into their formal fold these hitherto peripheral regions.
During Wabar Abdi Wabar Abdille’s visit, Miles Alem, the Ethiopian Ambassador to Kenya said, “You can’t preach regional integration from your capitals.
During the 2017 election contest for the Marsabit County gubernatorial seat, Kura Jarso, the 72nd Borana, issued a mura, an uncontestable decision endorsing Mohammed Mohamud Ali as the sole Borana gubernatorial candidate.
For the first time, finally, here was the Abba Gada giving his direct political endorsement to an individual, and on video.
But all this revival, invention and spectacle were not happening without drama and contest.
In December 2018, the Borana Supreme Leader, the Abba Gada, was in Marsabit to officiate a traditional ceremony conferring the status of Qae—a revered position in Borana political culture—on J.
He allegedly said that the Abba Gada was better off placing the title on a dog than on the former MP.
At the residence of the former MP where the traditional ceremony was being held, the teacher was questioned, and to the inquiries, Bandura allegedly responded in a light-hearted, unapologetic and near-dismissive manner.
He was not to be buried if he died, his sons and daughters were not to marry, his cows were not to be grazed and watered on Borana land.
Those who witnessed the event say that Bandura was like a man possessed by some spiritual force; he fell to his knees, rolled in the mud as he begged for forgiveness.
In centuries past, a customary law, serr daawe, forbade the Abba Gada from crossing into Kenya.
His third visit, in December 2018, was to attend to his clan’s affairs and to make J.J.
A blogger referred to the visit as Cultural Regional Diplomacy saying it had thrown “the town into a rapturous frenzy .
After the visit to Isiolo, the Abba Gada visited Raila Odinga’s office.
“They are on this side , and thus, they are far from culture.
It exists in severely abridged forms,” and that the reason the Gada “is an irrelevant institution in the lives of Kenya Boran today is because there are no Gada leaders in their territory.” Legesse observes that what remains of Oromo political organisation in Northern Kenya “is the culture and language of Gada and age-sets, but not the working institutions.
The mythical powers of the Abba Gada had manifested first in Bandura’s fainting, then in his travel to The Hague, and finally in the job change.
Even while based in Ethiopia, the Gada system has animated Borana electoral politics in the region.
A cursory analysis of all elected Borana leaders in the Kenyan parliament reveals that there have been only two members of parliament who have served a third parliamentary term, which for one MP was a party nomination.
It would seem that within the Borana’s Gada system is the belief that there is nothing new or different an elected politician can offer beyond eight years in office.
Bandura was a tiny man, and his encounter with the Abba Gada is recent.
In June 1997, with Oromo calls for liberation in Ethiopia spilling over into Moyale politics, fighters of the Oromo Liberation Front hiding in Kenya and OLF politics in high gear, Moyale town was polarised, with OLF sympathisers on one side and those against them on the other.
The Abba Gada is said to have arrived in Moyale dressed in a suit, a cowboy hat and leather shoes, in a government vehicle with security in tow.
This led the Abba Gada to curse him, asking the Borana to choose another leader.
Almost three decades later, during the last Abba Gada’s visit to Marsabit, other incidences of defiance were witnessed, of men who refused to attend his events or heed his summons.
The Gada system has been relatively resilient under various forms of state-imposed changes, assaults by the Amhara, and Ethiopia’s federalist policies which have attempted to manipulate the Gada by interchanging religious and political roles and twinning traditional roles with formal state ones.
The Kenyan Gabra must be surprised by their brothers in Ethiopia who have had two Abba Gadas so far; the first one served for 16 years, and the second one is serving his second year since his coronation.
Tablino, a missionary-anthropologist who worked for a long time amongst the Gabra, “the Gabra ‘nation’ could be described as a federation with five capitals, or yaa.
When it happens, the grand Yaa meetings happen after a very long time.
It seems that the 1998 Yaa assembly did not make a lasting impact because in 2011, in Kalacha, the Yaa met to endorse Amb.
The elders invoked their untested and theoretically supernatural powers across northern Kenya and put themselves at the risk of ridicule and disrespect.
That process has been completed and now the councils of elders are in turn legitimising the political class, with almost all the endorsements for the 2022 elections going to rich contractors and past politicians.
In Mandera, the Asare clan who had formed an ad hoc committee eight months ago vetted four individuals interested in the gubernatorial post and eventually settled on the current Mandera County Assembly Speaker.
He has reduced the council of elders to agents of his charity, doled out as employment for the children of elders or in the form of lucrative contracts.
On the other hand, governors incentivise the elders and use the concessions granted to control them.
The Gabra professionals’ protest of the Yaa’s manipulation during the hurried endorsement of Ukur Yatani in 2016 is one example.
But cases of elders summoning so-and-so’s son for saying whatnot on a Facebook page or in a WhatsApp group have occurred in many northern counties.
The invention of parallel councils and the emergence of factions within councils of elders have severe implications for conflict arbitration processes and the management of pastureland and rangeland.
It was an attack that was destined to unleash dangerous disruptions and destabilize the global order.
Subsequent studies have shown that in the early hours of the terrorist attacks confusion and apprehension reigned even at the highest levels of government.
The road to ruin over the next twenty years was paved in those early days after 9/11 in an unholy contract of incendiary expectations by the public and politicians born out of trauma and hubris.
Frantically, she told me the news was reporting unprecedented terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Virginia, and that a passenger plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.
When she eventually did, and to her eternal relief and that of the entire family, my mother-in-law reported that she had received a call from her husband.
The dominant narrative was one of unflinching and unreflexive national sanctimoniousness; America was attacked by the terrorists for its way of life, for being what it was, the world’s unrivalled superpower, a shining nation on the hill, a paragon of civilization, democracy, and freedom.
It can be argued that it contributed to recessions of democracy in the US itself, and in other parts of the world including Africa, in so far as it led to increased weaponization of religious, ethnic, cultural, national, and regional identities, as well as the militarization and securitization of politics and state power.
While cause and effect lack mathematical precision in humanity’s perpetual historical dramas, they reflect probabilities based on the preponderance of existing evidence.
In an edited book I published in 2008, The Roots of African Conflicts, I noted in the introductory chapter entitled “The Causes & Costs of War in Africa: From Liberation Struggles to the ‘War on Terror’” that this war combined elements of imperial wars, inter-state wars, intra-state wars and international wars analysed extensively in the chapter and parts of the book.
America’s hysterical unilateralism, which was increasingly opposed even by its European allies, represented an attempt to recentre its global hegemony around military prowess in which the US remained unmatched.
In the treacherous war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq it left a trail of destruction in terms of deaths and displacement for millions of people, social dislocation, economic devastation, and severe damage to the infrastructures of political stability and sovereignty.
More than a decade and a half after I wrote my critique of the “war on terror”, its horrendous costs on the US itself and on the rest of the world are much clearer than ever.
Writing in September 2011, one dismissed what he called the five myths of 9/11: that the possibility of hijacked airliners crashing into buildings was unimaginable; the attacks represented a strategic success for al-Qaeda; Washington overreacted; a nuclear terrorist attack is an inevitability; and civil liberties were decimated after the attacks.
But terrorism, whether from jihadists, white nationalists, or other sources, is part of life for the indefinite future, and some sort of government response is as well.
To understand the traumatic impact of 9/11 on the US, and its disastrous overreaction, it is helpful to note that in its history, the American homeland had largely been insulated from foreign aggression.
However, both quickly dissipated because of America’s overweening pursuit of a vengeful, misguided, haughty, and obtuse “war on terror”, which was accompanied by derisory and doomed neo-colonial nation-building ambitions that were dangerously out of sync in a postcolonial world.
The terrorist attacks prompted an overhaul of the country’s intelligence and law-enforcement systems, which led to an almost Orwellian reconceptualization of “homeland security” and formation of a new federal department by that name.
It also facilitated the militarization of policing in local and state jurisdictions as part of a vast and amorphous war on domestic and international terrorism.
On the progressive side was the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and rejuvenated gender equality and immigrants’ rights activists, and on the reactionary side were white supremacist militias and agitators including those who carried the unprecedented violent attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
Indeed, as The Washington Post columnist, Colbert King recently reminded us, “Looking back, terrorist attacks have been virtually unrelenting since that September day when our world was turned upside down.
In September 2001, incredulity at the foreign terrorist attacks exacerbated the erosion of popular trust in the competence of the political class that had been growing since the restive 1960s and crested with Watergate in the 1970s, and intensified in the rising political partisanship of the 1990s.
9/11 offered a historic opportunity to seek and sanctify a new external enemy in the continuous search for a durable foreign foe to sustain the creaking machinery of the military, industrial, media and ideological complexes of the old Cold War.
The expanding pool of America’s undesirable and undeserving racial others reflected growing anxieties by segments of the white population about their declining demographic, political and sociocultural weight, and the erosion of the hegemonic conceits and privileges of whiteness.
9/11 allowed the party to shed its camouflage as a national party and unapologetically adorn its white nativist and chauvinistic garbs.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union and its socialist empire in central and Eastern Europe, there were expectations of an economic dividend from cuts in excessive military expenditures.
. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why America went from a fiscal surplus of 2% of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today.
According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, from 2001 to 2020 the US security apparatuses spent US$230 billion a year, for a total of US$5.4 trillion, on these dubious efforts.
Thanks to these twin economic assaults, the US largely abandoned investing in the country’s physical and social infrastructure that has become more apparent and a drag on economic growth and the wellbeing for tens of millions of Americans who have slid from the middle class or are barely hanging onto it.
Through this uncompromising imperial adventure in the treacherous geopolitical quicksands of the Middle East, including “the graveyard of empires,” Afghanistan, the US succeeded in squandering the global sympathy and support it had garnered in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 not only from its strategic rivals but also from its Western allies.
9/11 accelerated the gradual slide for the US from the pedestal of global power as diplomacy and soft power were subsumed by demonstrative and bellicose military prowess.
In the words of Jonathan Powell that are worth quoting at length, “The principal failure in Afghanistan was, rather, to fail to learn, from our previous struggles with terrorism, that you only get to a lasting peace when you have an inclusive negotiation – not when you try to impose a settlement by force.
In 2020, military expenditure in the US reached US$778 billion, higher than the US$703.6 billion spent by the next nine leading countries in terms of military expenditure, namely, China .
Under the national delirium of 9/11, the clamour for retribution was deafening as evident in Congress and the media.
By the time the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 was taken in the two houses of Congress, and became law on 16 October 2002, the ranks of cooler heads had begun to expand but not enough to put a dent on the mad scramble to expand the “war on terror”.
Beginning with Bush, and for subsequent American presidents, the law became an instrument of militarized foreign policy to launch attacks against various targets.
By then, it had of course become clear that the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq were destined to become a monumental disaster and defeat in the history of the United States that has sapped the country of its trust, treasure, and global standing and power.
The logic of counterterrorism persisted even under the Obama administration that retired the phrase “war on terror” but not its practices; it expanded drone warfare by authorizing an estimated 542 drone strikes which killed 3,797 people, including 324 civilians.
The Trump Administration signed a virtual surrender pact, a “peace agreement,” with the Taliban on 29 February 2020, that was unanimously supported by the UN Security Council.
Following the signing of the Doha Agreement, the Taliban insurgency intensified, and the incoming Biden administration indicated it would honour the commitment of the Trump administration for a complete withdrawal, save for a minor extension from 1 May to 31 August 2021.
Some among America’s security elites, armchair think tanks, and pundits turned their outrage on Biden whose execution of the final withdrawal they faulted for its chaos and for bringing national shame, notwithstanding overwhelming public support for it.
The predictable failure of the American imperial mission in Afghanistan and Iraq left behind wanton destruction of lives and society in the two countries and elsewhere where the “war on terror” was waged.
. No one mentioned that the locals might not be passive recipients of our benevolence, or that early elections and a quickly drafted constitution might not achieve national consensus but rather exacerbate divisions in Iraq society.
Iran achieved a level of influence in Iraq and in several parts of the region that seemed inconceivable at the end of the protracted and devastating 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran War that left behind mass destruction for hundreds of thousands of people and the economies of the two countries.
In the meantime, new jihadist movements emerged from the wreckage of 9/11 superimposed on long-standing sectarian and ideological conflicts that provoked more havoc in the Middle East, and already unstable adjacent regions in Asia and Africa.
It also focuses on Africa’s apparent need for human rights modelled on idealized Western principles that never prevented Euro-America from perpetrating the barbarities of slavery, colonialism, the two World Wars, other imperial wars, and genocides, including the Holocaust.
Suddenly, Africa’s strategic importance, which had declined precipitously after the end of the Cold War, rose, and the security paradigm came to complement, compete, and conflict with the humanitarian paradigm as US Africa policy achieved a new strategic coherence.
The cornerstone of the new policy is AFRICOM, which was created out of various regional military programmes and initiatives established in the early 2000s, such as the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn Africa, and the Pan-Sahel Initiative, both established in 2002 to combat terrorism.
Many an African state rushed to pass broadly, badly or cynically worded anti-terrorism laws and other draconian procedural measures, and to set up special courts or allow special rules of evidence that violated fair trial rights, which they used to limit civil rights and freedoms, and to harass, intimidate, and imprison and crackdown on political opponents.
In addition to the restrictions on political and civil rights among Africa’s autocracies and fledgling democracies, the subordination of human rights concerns to anti-terrorism priorities, the “war on terror” exacerbated pre-existing political tensions between Muslim and Christian populations in several countries and turned them increasingly violent.
According to a recent paper by Alexandre Marc, the Global Terrorism Index shows that “deaths linked to terrorist attacks declined by 59% between 2014 and 2019 — to a total of 13,826 — with most of them connected to countries with jihadi insurrections.
If much of Africa benefited little from the US-led global war on terrorism, it is generally agreed China reaped strategic benefits from America’s preoccupation in Afghanistan and Iraq that consumed the latter’s diplomatic, financial, and moral capital.
As elsewhere, China adopted the narrative of the “war on terror” to silence local dissidents and “to criminalize Uyghur ethnicity in the name of ‘counter-terrorism’ and ‘de-extremification.” The Chinese Communist Party “now had a convenient frame to trace all violence to an ‘international terrorist organization’ and connect Uyghur religious, cultural and linguistic revivals to ‘separatism.’ Prior to 9/11, Chinese authorities had depicted Xinjiang as prey to only sporadic separatist violence.
Treasury Department bolstered that allegation by attributing solely to ETIM the same terror incident data, that the Chinese government’s January 2002 White Paper had attributed to various terrorist groups.
Initially, it appeared relations between the US and Russia could be improved by sharing common cause against Islamic extremism.
The Bush administration’s expectations of the partnership were limited.” It believed that in return for Moscow’s assistance in the war on terror, “it had enhanced Russian security by ‘cleaning up its backyard’ and reducing the terrorist threat to the country.
recognition of Russia as a great power with the right to a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space.
Nevertheless, during the twenty years of America’s “forever wars” Russia recovered from the difficult and humiliating post-Soviet decade of domestic and international weakness.
While the majority of the 9/11 attackers were from Saudi Arabia, the antediluvian and autocratic Saudi regime continued to be a staunch ally of the United States.
For the so-called international community, the US-led “war on terror” undermined international law, the United Nations, and global security and disarmament, galvanized terrorist groups, diverted much-needed resources for development, and promoted human rights abuses by providing governments throughout the world with a new license for torture and abuse of opponents and prisoners.
Twenty years after 9/11, the US has little to show for its massive investment of trillions of dollars and the countless lives lost.
It demonstrably has little influence over nominal allies such as Pakistan, which has been aiding the Taliban for decades, and Saudi Arabia, which has prolonged the conflict in Yemen.
The day after 9/11, the French newspaper Le Monde declared, “In this tragic moment, when words seem so inadequate to express the shock people feel, the first thing that comes to mind is: We are all Americans!” Now that the folly of the “forever wars” is abundantly clear, can Americans learn to say and believe, “We’re an integral part of the world,” neither immune from the perils and ills of the world, nor endowed with exceptional gifts to solve them by themselves.
This would entail establishing a truly inclusive multiracial and multicultural polity, abandoning the antiquated electoral college system through which the president is elected that gives disproportionate power to predominantly white small and rural states, getting rid of gerrymandering that manipulates electoral districts and caters to partisan extremists, and stopping the cancer of voter suppression aimed at disenfranchising Blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities.
When I returned to my work as Director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall of 2002, following the end of my sabbatical, I found the debates of the 1990s about the relevance of area studies had been buried with 9/11.
Thus, the academy, including the marginalized enclave of area studies, did not escape the suffocating tentacles of 9/11 that cast its shadow on every aspect of American politics, society, economy, and daily life.
Whither the future? A friend of mine in Nairobi, John Githongo, an astute observer of African and global affairs and the founder of the popular and discerning online magazine, The Elephant, wrote me to say, “America’s defeat in Afghanistan may yet prove more consequential than 9/11”.