By Sara Elizabeth Williams

The West’s reaction to 9/11 was excessive and misguided, wrongly influenced by hubris, hysteria and ignorance. Ten years on, we are still mired in a mess largely of our own making.

Last night’s First Wednesday Special: Changing world – conflict, culture and terrorism in the 21st century, which was in association with BBC Arabic, looked at how the decade post-9/11 has reshaped our world. Chaired by presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House, the discussion at the Royal Institution of Great Britain turned to the question of what we learned – and how could we have done things differently?

For all their differences of opinion, the five members of the panel – journalists Mehdi Hasan, Isabel Hilton and Michael Goldfarb, ex British diplomat and founder of Independent Diplomat Carne Ross, and co-Founder and executive director of Quilliam and Founder of Khudi, Maajid Nawaz were in agreement on the most critical point: the reaction to 9/11 was a wrong one.

The response to non-state terrorist action should no be a declaration of war against individual states, but action against the non-state organisations.

The state-directed violence employed has destabilised entire populations and brought about some of the very things it sought to eradicate. Homegrown radicalisation comes at a devastating cost, and it is one we are becoming all too familiar with in the Islamic world and in the US and Europe.

Nawaz, who was formerly on the UK national leadership for the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir, reminded the audience that the process of radicalisation is the result of a political awakening, not a religious experience. For this reason, the right reaction would have been to support democratisation. But this wasn’t on the policy agenda:

“For decades we have been following a policy of sponsoring dictatorships and human rights abusers, and we ended up with a choice: support dictators or terrorists. But there was a third way: we could have supported civil society.”

While terrorism undermines the rule of law, Ross and Hasan pointed out that the West’s reaction did the same: we failed ourselves and the communities we sought to reach. The price of this mistake, according to Hilton, who is editor of chinadialogue.net.

“Now we have no moral standing to talk about human rights. In the course of the war on terror, we threw away everything that was worth defending. The damage we did to ourselves was greater than that which was done to us.”

Hilton also brought up the language of fear and safety – the American rhetoric over the last ten years. This, again, was the wrong invocation: ten years on, Americans still don’t feel safe. But is the mistake reversible? Hasan, who is senior political editor at the New Statesman, described a “fear industry grown our of control”.

Another cost is financial. Being at war has become normal for Americans. This affects policy: few politicians are willing to question Homeland Security spending. But for how long? Goldfarb, who is an author, journalist, broadcaster and GlobalPost’s London correspondent, answered:

“‘The war on terror’ is the worst phrase ever concocted. It’s a forever concept that can never end.”

The panel also looked at how the West’s misreaction to 9/11 may have paved the way for China’s global advance. Hilton, an expert on the subject, pointed out that China is seeking economic power by securing food, resources and access to water while letting other states get on with the international security agenda. In another ten years, we may consider this anniversary the beginning of a second turning point in the geopolitical landscape.  One of the evening’s most-tweeted comments was made by Hilton, who noted:

“Wars have very, very long tails… they don’t end when the whistle blows.”

For those at tonight’s event, it would seem that the end of these wars will be a long time coming, indeed.

The hashtag for this event was #fcbbca

We will be discussing the "War on Terror" that was waged in the wake of 9/11, the impact of a global battle characterised in terms of "good vs. evil": and asking if it is a war that can ever be won. What has been the impact of both the reality and rhetoric on an increasingly interconnected world? The panel will also be taking stock of the seismic events the world has witnessed in the past decade.

Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House who was living and working in New York on 9/11 and anchored the New York end of the special programme that night for BBC One. Twitter: @paddy_o_c

With:

Mehdi Hasan, senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman and a former Channel 4 news and current affairs editor, co-author of Ed: the Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader and author of the new ebook The Debt Delusion.  Twitter:@ns_mehdihasan

Carne Ross, a former British diplomat, author and journalist. Having resigned from the British foreign service after giving secret testimony to an official inquiry into the Iraq war, he then set up the world’first independent diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat, which advises marginalised countries and groups around the world.  He is author of The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power And Change Politics in the 21st Century. Twitter: @carneross

Maajid Nawaz, co-Founder and executive director of Quilliam and founder of Khudi,  and Founder of Khudi, he was formerly on the UK national leadership for the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). During his 14 years with HT he was a founding member of its Denmark and Pakistan operations. During a four year sentence in an Egyptian prison he renounced Islamist ideology while remaining Muslim. He now engages in counter-Islamist thought-generating, social-activism, writing, debating and media appearances. Twitter:@MaajidNawaz

Michael Goldfarb, author, journalist, broadcaster and GlobalPost’s London correspondent. Goldfarb has covered conflicts and conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, the Middle East and Latin America for NPR and the BBC. He covered the war in Iraq as an unembedded reporter based in Kurdistan. His book on the conflict, Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq was named one of The New York Times‘ Notable Books of 2005. On September 11, 2001 he was live on the air from 10 until noon in the US presenting part of NPR’s coverage and since then has reported extensively on radical Islam from Cairo and Tehran to the streets of London. Twitter: @MGEmancipation

Book tickets here. 

The decision to go into Afghanistan was necessary as a kind of “acting out” to restore American national confidence and pride in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001, but it was done with little idea about what was to be achieved by it.

That was the claim of Jean MacKenzie, senior correspondent for GlobalPost and previously programme director for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting in Kabul, about the decision of president George Bush to send troops into Afghanistan less than a month after the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001.

"We had to go in, America had to kick ass because we had been attacked and we had to prove that we were big guys, and there was very little resistance to going in to Afghanistan, Afghanistan was a very convenient ass to kick, because it was not being really defended," said MacKenzie.

MacKenzie, who was taking part in a recent discussion titled: Counterinsurgency and the "War on Terror": Doomed to fail? agreed that America had to react to the terror attacks in New York and Washington. The problem was not the decision to intervene, but  the fact that it was done without a clear idea of what it would accomplish, she said:

"We didn’t need to go in with this open-ended brief of we’re going in there to get rid of al-Quaeda, now we’re going in there so that little girls can go to school and maybe we’re there so women don’t have to wear burqas and now we’re there, as Time magazine tells us, so that women’s noses are not cut off. Where does it stop? We needed to define our goals from the very beginning."

There was also a lack of clarity about who the enemy was, said MacKenzie, who claimed local groups could manipulate NATO or the International Security Assistance Force into fighting their battles by claiming their opponents were Taliban:

"We go into an area, like in Kunar, where two groups are fighting over logging rights – another gets close to us and says they are the Taliban. We start fighting them and they fight back and as soon as they do, they become an insurgency."

As a result of the lack of clarity the rhetoric about the US mission in Afghanistan had taken on a life of its own, MacKenzie argued:

"It’s a very broad statement but I think we are now fighting the Afghan people, the Afghan society. We say the Taliban stone women for adultery, the Taliban stone young couples, the Taliban throw acid in the faces of school children.

But in most of these cases, if you unravel it, it’s not the Taliban, it is the community that has done these things. So if we are fighting those manifestations of Afghan culture, we are not fighting the Taliban, we are fighting Afghan society, we are fighting a culture that we find noxious. That, I think, is quite a bit beyond our brief."

Ten years on, the mood in Afghanistan was one the “darkest despair”, said MacKenzie, adding that there is little trust on the ground in the ability of the Afghan forces to protect the people. In addition, things have gone "way beyond the point" when outside nations could impose anything on the country:

"There was a point at the beginning when there was a certain amount of hope and goodwill among Afghans, but I don’t feel it there any more," she said.

"The Afghans are more and more pessimistic, they have given up on their own government, how do you fight counterinsurgency when you have no legitimate government to partner with? How do we begin to do anything?

Yet the US is likely to leave Afghanistan with "honour and dignity in the strategic communications sense," said MacKenzie, who predicted that from now until the end of 2014 the US administration was going to be "busily engaged in painting a narrative of victory":

All that is required for us to have won is for the media to pack up and go home so there’s no focus on what’s actually happening and for us to redefine victory and to move the goalposts as it were."

Malte Roschinski, a security consultant, political analyst and author who reported from Afghanistan for AFP news agency, was also pessimistic about the future of Afghanistan and said he believed the best that the US could do was to "come up with a good PR strategy and hope for the next six months or so it’s going to stay fairly quiet".

"After that the media focus will have moved away from the country. There will be stories afterwards but the media works in cycles and public attention has just so much bandwidth anyway so it’s just going to be a PR exercise."