https://time.com/archive/7051680/osama-bin-ladens-pakistan-hideaway/ I didn’t fully comprehend what happened on 9/11 when it occurred. Now I’m 26, and I know a lot of what happened by history, talking to people, watching news reports and the world it produced around me. I’ve seen the videos, read the retrospectives, heard from people telling about where they were when the towers fell. There is, however, one aspect of the 9/11 saga I had not learned from a textbook: I was born and raised in Abbottabad, a Pakistani city which years later became one of the more famous names in the international War on Terror.
9/11 was more than just something that occurred in another country for my generation. We didn’t experience the attack, but rather its after-effects. The effects of what it was became a part of our lives, whether in watching it in the news, seeing checkpoints on the road, hearing about it in our schools around the world, or hearing all the wrong assumptions that people had before they’d even met us. The War on Terror had engulfed Pakistan and words of terror, militancy, security and extremism dominated the public discourse, where our region was always a subject of discussion in such terms as if it was the only way to understand us. Eventually Abbottabad itself gained international fame when the United States carried out an operation to kill Osama bin Laden there in 2011. For many, that one moment was their first- and only-time association with my city. Suddenly there was a place, they knew nothing of, that was in the headlines and one of the coordinates, it might have been one of the footnotes in somebody else’s war.
Abbottabad, however, for those of us who actually live here is something much simpler and much more whole: a home. It’s watching the streets as they go about their normal existence, a school van full of kids as people go about their day, seeing the same tea stalls open late, the mountains changing color in every season, the same small dreams in any town anywhere, a good grade, a good job, a good life for the people you love. Abbottabad is not a typical city. It is a place where people grow up, fall in love, raise their children, bury their parents and… well, nobody here knows that someone else is making them into a one-line item in a security report.
That contrast between the global label and the local reality has shaped how I think about 9/11 more than any single fact I have read. The world was right then in acknowledging that terrorism was not a problem that could be left to others, contained at an edge of a border and someone else’s problem. International cooperation, intelligence sharing, effective counterterrorism measures and active attempts to counter vulnerable communities’ radicalization grew far more significant and, in many instances, proved effective. Attacks were prevented. Networks were disrupted. The dread of a few violent individuals can, when not analyzed, turn into a general wariness of any individual who speaks their language, believes in their faith, has their passport, or their hometown. That shift rarely announces itself. It shows up instead in small, cumulative ways an extra glance, an extra question at a border crossing, a news segment that mentions a city’s name only in connection with violence, a joke that assumes the worst about where you are from. None of these moments are as dramatic as an attack, but together they constitute a constant, unspoken dread that millions of normal people have been forced to endure, for no wrongdoing of their own.
The thing I gained from the last quarter century was that security and human dignity are not conflictive, not mutually exclusive, and cannot be won one way and lost the other. There’s no sunshine version of this reflection that says otherwise: Terrorism needs to be met with firmness. But if counterterrorism is not going to be a viable strategy in the long run, it must not foster new grievances, be able to eliminate discrimination, or leave ordinary citizens feeling that they are always being seen through a prism of suspicion. A security strategy that alienates the very communities it depends on for cooperation and trust is not just morally costly; it is strategically self-defeating. Fear that hardens into prejudice does not make anyone safer. It simply relocates the resentment, and resentment, left to accumulate long enough, has its own way of becoming dangerous.
I have learned a lot from growing up here in Abbottabad, things that I can’t learn from a search engine or a Wikipedia summary; a place can have a global label that tells only a tiny, distorted part of its story. I know the city, the one where the air is cool in the summer and there are fruit orchards and the school grounds are full of kids who’ve never thought about geopolitics in their lives, and I do not know it, the one the rest of the world thinks it knows, from a single news cycle in 2011. Both are real, that is they exist. But only one is in fact, true to what it feels like to live here. People should not be defined by what happens in their city, their country, their religion or their community. No matter how much the individual actions of a few people resonated around the world, a billion individual lives cannot be summarized.
Sure, one of the greatest takeaways from 9/11 is that an enhanced security system, more surveillance, more checkpoints won’t stop terrorists. It needs robust institutions that are trusted by people. It takes responsible journalism that does not succumb to “the one-story approach” to the region. It needs education and economic opportunities strong enough to not allow extremist narratives to take hold in the first place. It needs trust, the kind that takes years to be earned and is lost in an instant when a community blames itself. Most of all, it demands bravery to identify those who commit violence from the millions who live in the same geographical area, who share a religion, or who identify as a people.
We should remember 9/11. We owe that to the families who have lived without the loved ones they lost that day, and to the people that lost their lives that day. But we should not forget it, nor let its memory become an automatic excuse for fear, a blank check that is cashed again and again against those who weren’t responsible for what was done. The safest communities are not those that are suspicious and that patrol their borders of who is in and who is out. They are communities in which people have faith in their institutions, who abhor all forms of violence, and who refuse to let hatred take root and grow more powerful than their shared humanity. Now, that’s what I think the last 25 years has taught us, not only how to prevent the next attack, but how to ensure that fear will never again shape who we consider our neighbor.