Twenty‑five years after 9/11, terrorism grows from short‑term political deals
In January 1995, firefighters entering Room 604 of Manila’s Doña Josefa Apartments found hot plates, wiring, timers, fuses, counterfeit passports, Bibles and clerical clothing—a makeshift lab for the Bojinka plot to bomb twelve US‑bound airliners over the Pacific, assassinate Pope John Paul II and attack President Bill Clinton during his 1994 Manila visit. The plot was exposed when a bomb‑making accident sent thick smoke into the sky; Ramzi Yousef fled to Pakistan, Abdul Hakim Murad was arrested, and the code‑name Mukhtar was later identified as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) after Abu Zubaydah’s 2002 interrogation. KSM was captured by Pakistan’s ISI with US help in March 2003, held in CIA secret detention and subjected to waterboarding, rectal hydration and feeding, providing key al‑Qaeda intel. He later evolved the Bojinka idea into the 9/11 attacks, using planes as weapons. Twenty‑five years after 9/11, the Costs of War Project estimates over 940,000 direct deaths in post‑9/11 war zones, while terrorism has spread to Africa’s Sahel and Lake Chad Basin and groups like Boko Haram—once courted by Borno politicians for electoral gain—have mutated into transnational threats. The article warns that short‑term deals with extremist proxies, from the US backing Afghan mujahideen and Pakistan sponsoring the Taliban to Nigeria’s tolerance of Boko Haram, always backfire, leaving ordinary people to pay the price. Will you demand leaders abandon such transactional bargains and instead build just societies, resilient institutions and inclusive political systems that deny extremists the grievances they exploit?