It was pretty easy to see, after a short while, that we weren't dealing with a conventional war of one country against another. The attacks came from a network of individuals operating in the shadows, no longer attached to a nation and funded by wealthier individuals and organizations with sometimes disturbing financial ties to Western countries and corporations. In HBO's TV series "The Wire", a show about Baltimore's drug war, Detective Lester Freamon says, "You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where...it's gonna take you." Unfortunately, we didn't see the "War on Terror" in this light and over the last ten years we have seen the cost.
We lost 2,977 people on September 11th. But since then, 6,011 American soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 100,000 Iraqis have died from our invasion and from the subsequent violence (it is hard to get an accurate number on this). Over 50,000 people have died in Afghanistan (these numbers's are unclear as well). Around 2000 Pakistanis have died from unmanned drone attacks. And another 500 coalition soldiers from 28 different countries have been lost as well. However, after all this death, we know very little about how such attacks are funded and one shudders when one thinks of how many more enemies have been created through our destructive actions and policies.
So, on the day after the death of Osama Bin Ladin, as I look at photos of people celebrating in the streets and hear everyone around me talking excitedly about the news, it's hard to feel what they feel. To be honest, I feel numb and I wonder what we, as a country, have learned from this experience.
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