9/11 and Pakistani society

Social effects of 9/11

By Mazhar Khan Jadoon

It was 8pm, Thursday evening in 2010 when we drove into Peshawar from Lahore. The GT Road that snakes through the city and ends up as Jamrud Road at Hayatabad was deserted with eery stillness all around. This road is normally choked with all kind of traffic and buzzes with people all the time busy doing businesses and carrying out daily chores.

I asked my friend, who lives in Peshawar, where have all the people gone? Why is there so much silence and darkness? A few people seen walking along the road looked scared and in unexplained hurry. Something was terribly wrong with things around as we drove through ‘the ghost town’. “It is Thursday today,” my friend, who was driving the car, murmured softly as if trying to keep the silence around intact. “Yes it is Thursday,” I retorted angrily as it made no sense to me. My friend clarified and explained, “Tomorrow is Friday and something bad will happen in the city. As happens routinely, there will be a blast somewhere in a market, school, mosque or some official building. Suicide bombers prefer Friday for their missions as they think Fridays are auspicious days to kill and die.”

Next morning scared and adamant Peshawarites are waiting for the moment to happen. Hospitals and medical staff are on standby and ambulances are revving up. DSNG (Digital System of News Gathering) vehicles with all the news crew are ready to cover the event live. Police personnel are gearing up to meet the eventuality. The whole city is bracing for the inevitable to happen.

Boom! Our Friday fear came true. I almost dropped my cup of tea as the windows of the room I was staying in were shattered by the shockwave of a suicide bombing nearby. Then follows what has become a routine for people — blood, bodies, ambulances and rescue operation with political rhetoric and official condolences. Our TV channels make it sure that every single gory detail is beamed to desensitized audience that has somehow developed a taste for all the real drama. It was unlike Peshawar — hostility had taken over hospitality. Strangers are no more welcome as respectable guests rather they are looked upon as potential terrorists ready to explode themselves.

The war on terror and the reactionary bombing have changed the entire social and cultural outlook of Peshawar. The ultraconservative society has further recoiled into a state of social isolation just to survive. People no more take their kids along for Friday prayers — a voluntary reversal of old traditions. Wedding gatherings are confined indoor, while in some parts of the country where Taliban hold sway fun celebrations are replaced with religious rituals. The culture of cinema and theatre has changed and artists and musicians are forced to change their professions as they keep facing threats by the moral vigilantes. The only place in Peshawar where you could have full view of a woman was the billboards atop cinemas along the GT Road, but these images have also been ‘Islamised’ to avoid the wrath of those averse to music and films.

This phenomenon is not Peshawar-specific — almost all major cities in the country have gone through a decade of social changes prompted by sheer fear. 9/11 has not only reshaped the world, it has also changed philosophies and poisoned mindsets around the world. Perhaps none living in major cities would have missed the bang of a bomb or the scenes of devastation caused by bombing. Those missing the chance would have their share of gory visuals with natural sound from our hyperactive TV channels whose camera crew always jump the gun to shoot.

America’s display of ‘shock and awe’ may have secured its citizens, but it has played havoc with Pakistan, changing the entire social fabric of the society. The war on terror and the consequent spree of suicide bombings have changed the way people live and think. The war has created different social phobias stealing the joy out of social gatherings and meetings. Social phobias driven by different fears affect many people who tend to get very anxious in crowds as they start imagining ghosts of suicide bombers lurking behind.

Another casualty of the post-9/11 world is the right to free movement due to mushrooming growth of barricades of concrete blocs and barbed wires on every road and street of Lahore — and it has become part of our life though it instills fear rather than security. Peshawar and twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi are no exceptions where one stumbles on every step over security checkposts manned by ready-to fire security personnel. Open places are shrinking while walls are growing taller and thicker. The growing number of concrete walls also symbolizes the divide the society is beginning to see — a divide between the extreme forces of liberalism and religious fundamentalism. The new ideologies (extreme left and extreme right) have pitted Qadris and Taseers of this land against each other and rest of the population has started aligning themselves with these two extremes. Again the victims are those toeing the middle path, the moderates, who are caught between the crossfire. They are forced to be ‘with us or with them’.

The post-9/11 destruction has been effected with a heavy price. “The cost of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan are estimated at 225,000 lives and up to $4trillion in US spending,” estimate scholars with the Eisenhower Research Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies in a new report by. The group’s “Costs of War” project has released new figures for a range of human and economic costs associated with the US military response to the 9/11 attacks. The Brown project says the wars have created more than 7.8 million refugees among Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis.

America has chased out al-Qaeda and its Taliban protectors into Pakistan, creating a new danger of the Pakistani society being taken over by militants. A decade after September 11, 2001, skepticism about the events of that day still persists among Muslim publics. In all of the Muslim countries polled recently by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, majorities still refuse to believe that the perpetrators of September 11 were Muslims. Pew finds that the Muslim world and the West still see the other as fanatical and violent. In Pakistan attitudes have moved to the extreme level — the percentage of Pakistani Muslims saying that Westerners are greedy, immoral, selfish and fanatical has increased by double-digits over the last five years.

“Among most of the Muslim publics polled, Muslims tend to identify with their religion, rather than their nationality. This is particularly true in Pakistan, where 94 per cent people think of themselves primarily as Muslim instead of Pakistani,” the finding says.