Chapter 2 continues…

SEPTEMBER 11 AND THE AFGHAN CONNECTION

The immediate cause of the collapse of the Taleban was the terrorist attacks on America’s World Trade Centre (WTC) and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. It was the “world’s most spectacular attack” marked by a series of co-ordinated attacks. Two hijacked planes crashed into and levelled New York’s WTC. In Washington DC, another hijacked aircraft wrecked parts of the Pentagon and a car bomb damaged the State Department. Thousands of people, primarily civilians were killed in this gruesome attack on America’s economic and military power centres.

US President George Bush declared the event as a terrorist attack and vowed that terrorism against the USA would not stand and promised to hunt down those responsible for the attacks.

The kind of planning, skill, training, finance, logistics involved in the attacks immediately drew suspicion towards Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of previous attacks on American embassies in 1998. He had also strong links with the Islamic militants who had attacked the WTC in 1993 and recently had demanded the release of the 1993 bombers. Some Arab journalists pointed out that bin Laden had warned three weeks earlier that he would carry out unprecedented attacks on US interests. Other US enemies who might have been interested in carrying out such an attack were the Palestinian groups and the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. It was argued that the Palestinian groups never carried out attacks on the US soil even in the height of their movements.

They also did not have the capacity to carry out an attack on such a large scale. The possibility of Saddam Hussein masterminding these attacks were also ruled out because he feared massive military retaliation, which however, he had to face later due to US’s world wide campaign against terrorism.

To be continued…