After two decades of the war on terror, do Muslim lives matter? | Commentary

The message flashed across dozens of wall screens as I stepped from the jet bridge into the airport terminal: US commandos had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The 10th anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001 was only a few months away, I had just landed in Italy to give talks on US security law and national security policy, and it seemed like some kind of milestone achieved the events that took place while I was in the air.

Today, a decade later, in the “Global War on Terror”, it is a completely different memory, not the attack on Abbottabad, that stands out from this trip.

After one of my lectures in a packed university hall in Brescia, I was approached by a young Muslim woman with a headscarf. By her name, her appearance, and her accented English, I read her as an Italian of Arab descent, possibly as the daughter of immigrants to Italy, or as an immigrant herself. Unlike the other students who lined up to speak to me, she had a short question: “Why is the United States waging war on Islam?”

I reflexively defied their premise. What we saw and lived was not a war against Islam and the Muslims as such, I dared. There were complex historical forces at play that drove various actors into multiple conflicts, I added, and the people and groups that the United States had labeled “terrorists” did not represent all Muslims. But because of the harsh realities of our time, this woman had come to the conclusion that there must be a US-led war on Islam. And she was far from alone with this belief. The perception she articulates is still widespread among Muslims worldwide, both in the global south and in the north.

As the world tries to take stock of 20 years of the “Global War on Terror”, the question of the young woman arises in my head with a contemporary twist: Is Muslim life important?

This question can be forgiven in the face of the dire toll that the US-led military campaigns have taken from Muslims almost everywhere. Over 71,000 civilians have died in Afghanistan, where America’s longest war has reached its predictable end, and in neighboring areas of Pakistan. In Iraq, over 200,000 civilians have died as a result of direct war-related violence since the US invasion. In Syria, US operations have killed hundreds of the staggering 227,000 civilian casualties in that country since the war began. Drone strikes and other US military operations in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen have killed over a thousand civilians.

These numbers are likely underestimated as it is difficult to collect comprehensive data in the war zones that ignited or sustained the United States. The use of so-called signature strikes increases the number of corpses left by US drones, while the listing of all “men of military age” killed in these attacks as combatants also systematically reduces the number of officially recognized civilian deaths. And the extent of the slaughter is compounded by the hundreds of thousands mutilated and the many millions displaced whose homes and societies have been destroyed or disfigured.

Since 9/11, the government has consistently used the law to enable, operationalize and justify violence against Muslims at home and abroad. The government relied on international law to aid its 2003 invasion of Iraq, claiming it was enforcing bans on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were never found and on Saddam Hussein’s equally fictitious aid to terrorists. Government attorneys also cited legal reasons to argue that the Constitution does not restrict US behavior outside our borders, which legitimizes the extrajudicial execution of US Muslim citizens abroad and the indefinite detention and torture of Muslim non-citizens in Guantánamo and Bagram there and anywhere on a network of CIA or proxy-run black sites. Congress has created military commissions that are only responsible for non-citizens and, in practice, serve only to bring Muslims to justice.

U.S. regular federal courts have implemented and upheld extensive laws punishing material assistance to foreign groups used almost exclusively in the persecution of U.S. Muslims (there are no equivalent laws criminalizing – and should be – criminalizing material assistance to native white supremacist groups The government has defended its widespread surveillance of American Muslims, mimicked by local law enforcement agencies like the NYPD, introducing Muslim registration, majority Muslim prisons, secret immigration control programs, the infamous Muslim ban, and even expatriation initiatives. The establishment and development of this alternative legal infrastructure has helped to reinforce and formalize the devaluation of Muslim life.

But as the country has been around for 20 years. President Biden’s recent remarks on ending the war in Afghanistan counted only American personnel lost and injured, and cited the need to “save American lives.” In the memorial cascade, the much larger contingent of the war against the Muslim victims of terror was largely wiped out. At this historical point, it is vital to focus the tribute of the past two decades on the lives of Muslims.

The supposed purity of American intentions – as US officials and experts often do – to continue to argue about the clear impact of US government actions affecting Muslims at home and abroad would be worse than insulting the violation. This kind of self-elevation rejects Muslim humanity and obscures both the United States’ position as a major supplier of political violence and its share of responsibility for the situation in many Muslim-majority countries today. Even my own attempt to give a differentiated answer to the Italian’s question a decade ago failed in a way because I missed the forest for the trees. If we expect others to take seriously the proclamations of the United States on the equality and dignity of all human beings, then it should be the legacy of the 11th Prize for American Power and Prosperity in the 21st Century.

Without wider recognition of the shared reality of millions of Muslims – and concrete steps to repair and transform that reality – we are helping to ensure its survival and diffusion. The relentless demonization of Muslims in contemporary American culture and politics, and the use of extreme and seemingly extraordinary policies and practices to affect them, have paved the way for other governments to follow suit. Long victims of state repression, Rohingya Muslims have recently faced a genocidal campaign by Myanmar’s military power in the name of counter-terrorism. When the US government declared that the use of detention camps and forced sterilization of Uyghurs and other Muslim populations in the Xinjiang area amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity, China defended the practice as part of its own war on terror.

Islamophobia as the prevailing ideology played a supporting role in these horrors; it has conveniently oiled the workings of a variety of suppression systems. But it is not the real cause of the existence of these systems, nor is it the primary driving force that drives them. The US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq provided leverage in the United States’ rivalries with Iran, Russia and China. Control of Iraq’s sizeable oil reserves also helped satisfy the United States’ expansive hunger for extracts while ongoing wars fuel the coffers of the military-industrial complex and its offshoots. Similarly, the Chinese campaign against its Muslim population takes advantage of a global Islamophobic climate to brutally anchor the Chinese Communist Party’s control over the oil-rich regions where Muslims live.

For countless Muslims and people everywhere, the message of the past 20 years is clear: Muslims’ rights are expendable, their blood cheap. Any real reckoning with the legacy of 9/11 must begin there.

Ramzi Kassem is Professor of Law at the CUNY School of Law, where he leads the CLEAR project.

The Washington Post