The tone of observances this week has been understandably sober. The shock of Sept. 11, 2001, and the grievousness of the losses it wreaked cannot be understated. Nor, it seems, does anyone tire of asking the existential questions that have become routine: Have we changed, as a people? Are we safer now? Did we trade too many freedoms for security? And has the sacrifice of lives and money since 9/11 been worth it?
These are important questions, but they are not the only ones worth asking. If it’s true that 9/11 changed everything — if not personally, then politically and geopolitically — it must surely have altered things in places other than the United States. So as we ponder how our own society has weathered the last 10 years, we might also consider how others have fared.
Looking abroad, a decade later, we see a world that is indeed much altered — in some places vastly for the better — because of what came in the aftermath of Sept. 11.
Ten years ago, Afghanistan was in the grip of theocratic despotism. The Taliban banned music, forbade girls from going to school, punished men for wearing their beards too short, and smashed and dynamited irreplaceable antiquities on the grounds that they were idolatrous. Women could be killed for the crime of leaving their homes without male chaperones.
Today in Afghanistan, girls’ school enrollment has skyrocketed, women work as professionals, a vibrant musical culture has rebounded, and men can wear their beards as they like. Afghanistan has not been transformed into Shangri-La, but the vast majority of its people are no longer groaning under theocratic tyranny.
The same is true of Iraq. Ten years ago, Saddam Hussein ran one of the most repressive and murderous regimes on Earth. Along with darker events that transpired in the last decade, Iraqis tasted democracy — remember those purple-inked fingers, those brave faces? The sight of elections in the heart of the Arab world, where freedom had been almost unknown, stirred something powerful.
Who could have guessed in September 2001 that the suppressed (and sometimes terrorized) men and women of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula would defy their authoritarian regimes and demand democracy for themselves, 10 years later, in the Arab Spring of 2011?
George W. Bush has often said that history will determine whether the course he steered after 9/11 was the correct one. History takes the long view; longer than a decade, for sure, and so it is still a while yet before it reaches its verdict on the 43rd president.
It is right that Americans should mourn our lost, and ponder the solemn lessons of 9/11. But one can judge whether a cost was justified only by considering what was bought. It would be a mistake to miss the positive things that came in the aftermath of that horror and death. Human events flow, one from the other, and sometimes good can spring from the evil that men do.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
