THE 9/11 attacks happened 25 years ago, ushering in a new epoch. The so-called global war on terror was launched by the Bush administration a few days later, and Washington has wreaked havoc across the globe ever since.
The majority of the world’s states have followed the US lead by making the prosecution and hunting down of ‘terrorists’ their primary raison d’être. Ideological apparatuses, including the culture industry, have indoctrinated generations of young and old alike into believing that ‘terror’ is ubiquitous and that the state must be endlessly empowered to snuff it out, even at the cost of basic liberties.
Pakistan was one of the major staging grounds of the ‘war on terror’, facilitating both the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan whilst also launching innumerable military operations on its own soil. A plethora of ‘anti-terrorist’ laws have been promulgated since 2001, the scope of which is growing wider. While these instruments are deployed to clamp down on all forms of dissent and popular political mobilisation, the insurgencies and other forms of political violence that ostensibly should have been curbed by the state’s various ‘counterterrorist’ initiatives have only become more intense.
Beneath the surface, a global military-industrial complex profits endlessly from the West’s totalitarian regime. Washington has thrown $8 trillion at various wars since 2001, a significant chunk of which has been pocketed by private defence contractors integrated with the deep state. In Pakistan, too, the ‘war on terror’ inaugurated a host of opportunities for state functionaries and private contractors to mint money.
The policing of dissent is paralleled by Big Tech’s power.
Today, we are at another crossroads. With the rise of Big Tech to the apex of global capitalism, the nexus of state and private capital has morphed into a behemoth without historical precedent. The discourse around ‘terrorism’ expanded some years ago in conjunction with the dramatic transformations of cultural, economic and political life provoked by digitalisation. Terms like ‘cyberterrorism/‘cybersecurity’ and ‘fifth-generation war’ reflect the evolution of a political idiom that both incorporates the logics of the war on terror and extends well beyond it.
The policing of dissent by the state and aligned propagandists in the digital lifeworld is paralleled by the immense power of Big Tech companies to access, share and manipulate data. Earlier this week, a whistleblower resigned from Anthropic, warning that AI development is being allowed to spiral into an existential threat to humanity. Anthropic’s Claude tool has already shown its destructive capabilities at the outset of the war on Iran. Edward Snowden told us what was coming as early as 2013.
Despite their claims of being pro-market libertarians, billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are buttressing the state’s immense coercive and surveillance capacities. They view humanity as a plaything that is, at best, ‘saved’ and, at worst, sacrificed in the interests of landing on Mars or crafting more ‘intelligent’ species. Quite aside from hyperbolic claims that an AI-triggered extinction event is around the corner, the unbridled pursuit of power and profit by Big Tech alongside the contemporary state’s unlimited quest for social control must surely trouble anyone concerned with the age-old quest for human emancipation.
Even non-human life is at stake. At a time when climate breakdown events are playing out with ever greater frequency and intensity, states everywhere are bending over backwards to build huge data centres to serve Big Tech’s interests by guaranteeing enormous and uninterrupted supplies of electricity and water. The US state and Silicon Valley billionaires are the primary protagonists of the contemporary militarised capitalist order. But we cannot be seduced by blind-faith arguments that there are ‘good’ states — not least of them our own — and ‘green’ capitalisms that do not conform to the overarching logic of the system.
We need, instead, to learn the lessons from the ‘war on terror’ and stop being cheerleaders for an even more sinister and unhinged digitalised fusion of state and corporate power that will shape our present and future.
A critical mass in Pakistan continues to speak truth to the militarised ruling class over its whittling away of the few civil liberties we still possess, including in the digital domain, whilst also resisting resource grabs and dispossession. The challenge, however, is outlined every time an episode of ‘terrorism’ is capitalised upon by the state to whip up a nationalist frenzy in which all good sense is abandoned.
If the global totalitarian regime’s march is to be halted, we must coalesce around an anti-capitalist ideological politics rooted in working people and nature. And soon.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, September 11th, 2026
