Bitter, Not Sweet

We commemorated September 11, 2002, not with memorials, or church services, or even an address by the president or any other government official. Instead we were treated to a shootout between seven Al-Qaeda suspects hiding in a residential apartment about three minutes away from my house. They had hidden there and apparently taken the residents of the building hostage.

The police, rangers, commandos and various other special forces, including the FBI, I am sure, arrived at the street and began a gun battle the likes of which Sunset Boulevard has never seen. The police fired thousands of rounds at the house; the suspects retaliated by throwing grenades at the police.

The police shouted at them on the megaphone to give themselves up, but their response was to throw another grenade at them. Finally, two hours later, the police had managed to kill two of the suspects and capture the five others – all Arabic or Arabic speaking men. They left the house marked with hundreds of bullet holes and the body of a four year old girl who had been killed in the crossfire (as first reported; later in the following day’s newspapers it said the girl was merely unconscious from the tear gas used to drive the suspects out of the building. We will probably never know the truth). It is said that the men were shouting "Allah hu Akbar" as they fought, and the words "Allah Hu Akbar" were written on the wall in blood inside the apartment.

So the western world gets flowers, songs, poetry, tributes, while we get yet another dirty job to complete. We didn’t get plaques to put on the spots where the French engineers were killed by a suicide bomber or where twelve Pakistanis died outside the US Consulate. Instead, the roads were blocked, the Arab Consulate under heavy guard, the American, Australian, and British embassies closed, and army helicopters and planes patrolling overhead, buzzing around in endless circles that lasted all day long.

I wonder how the hundreds of young Pakistani students with admissions to US universities were feeling as they watched the twenty-four hour programming on CNN, acceptance letters in their drawers but no visas in their passports. Are their parents secretly glad that their children aren’t going to a country that in one year has changed its motto from "liberty and justice for all" to "You are either with us or against us"? I wonder how many of those students harbored a secret admiration for Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and are now cursing him for having affected their lives in a way they could never have anticipated.

As a result of September 11, Pakistan will now probably be able to reach its target of ten billion dollars in forex reserves, a feat previously deemed impossible. It has made a comeback from being one of the world’s most isolated countries, to Musharraf finding himself on the cover of Newsweek and the Economist, being praised for his support in the war against terror. But no Trojan horse comes without its price. We have all learned that by now.

Where was the acknowledgement for what we’ve suffered, here in Pakistan? Where is the telegram of commiseration from any world leader, any letters of goodwill from the American people to us, telling us that they appreciate what we’ve had to sacrifice in order to help them? Where were even the local newspapers’ tributes to the Pakistanis who died on 9-11? They say that since the Afghan campaign, Al-Qaeda has fled Afghanistan and now regrouped in Karachi, where they are planning to spread as much terror as they can on Western interests and all those who befriend the West.

Is this going to be "Afghanistan: The Sequel" for us? I would quote Winston Churchill about ends and beginnings and beginnings of ends and ends of beginnings, but it seems too trite for the complexities and dangers that still face us.

All the news channels – Fox, BBC, CNN – said that the remembrance of September 11 yesterday was "bittersweet". Well, over here in Pakistan, I see a lot of bitter, and not very much of the sweet. But then, in the fifty-odd years of our existence, that’s the way it’s always been.