ISLAMABAD: Former Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed has said that the post-9/11 military intervention failed to secure long -term American hegemony and instead inadvertently facilitated the rise of China and autonomous Muslim middle powers in a thoroughly transformed global order.
In a critical assessment of global shifts, the veteran technocrat argued that Washington’s policy maneuvers over the past 25 years have severely diminished American superpower status.
He also said that 9/11 promoted Greater Israel agenda. “Twenty-five years after 9/11, the United States has emerged weaker, conceding space to China, Muslim middle powers in the Middle East becoming relevant in a transformed world’,” Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed said at Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) here Tuesday.
The biggest change is that before 9/11, US was the ‘sole superpower’but now that’s no longer the case. In his comprehensive presentation, Senator Mushahid Hussain presented a Fact Sheet on ‘9/11 in 25, the date that changed the world’, which quoted a study of the Brown University stating that the United States squandered $8 trillion in 20 years after 9/11, resulting in 38 million people displaced and nearly 5 million direct or indirect deaths as well as 324,000 drones, bombs and missiles expended in battle-front countries like Afghanistan, former Fata region in Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Lebanon.
Senator Mushahid Hussain also gave an interesting citation from American sources about how the Pentagon had decided just in nine days after 9/11 to launch wars against seven Muslim countries including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Libya,,Somalia and Sudan.
He also quoted the prominent American journalist, Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times on May 8, 2003 that “If 25 men working in the vicinity of the White House had been exiled to an Island, there would have been no Iraq war”, implying that this war was pushed and promoted by a selected and influential group of pro-Israel lobbyists and journalists.
Senator Mushahid Hussain also cited a book by a British author, Lawless World, which stated that prior to the American invasion of Iraq, US President Bush had shared with Prime Minister Tony Blair his plan to target Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on the ostensible plea of nuclear proliferation.
Senator Mushahid Hussain also said that one of the biggest mistakes of 9/11 was that during a meeting in Bonn in December 2001, the opportunity of reconciliation with the defeated Afghan Taliban as well as the opportunity to restore the Afghan monarchy, which had been the centre of gravity of the modern Afghan state, was missed.
Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2026
