Manhattan rebuilds but the scars remain

Ten years on, Glogowski seems cheerfully and gratefully Christian - ''I asked God to save me and that is why I'm standing before you today.''

By contrast, the silver-haired Guarnera is a troubled man. His account takes in the complex - he quotes formulae on the weight of each aircraft and the speed at which they hammer-punched the towers - and the graphic: his stooping on the pavement when he finally exited the north tower to retrieve the hard hat worn by a man who, he says, died when he was hit by a jumper, the term used to describe those who chose leaping to their death over incineration. Guarnera tears up but holds my eye, as he talks of friends and funerals in the days that followed.

Cleared of more than 100,000 truckloads of rubble the 6.5-hectare site remained idle for years. It was not until 2006, when the worst phases of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars had begun, that governments, developers, insurers and victims' families - perhaps one of the most powerful lobbies to emerge in recent memory - could agree on how to redevelop the site as a commercial venture and as a memorial which today carries a total price tag of $11 billion.

The term ''finished'' is loosely applied to an impressive memorial of hundreds of swamp white oaks and two huge water features that use the basement spaces of the twin towers. But guests at today's commemoration will find themselves amid the controlled chaos of a giant construction site and dwarfed by glass sheaths that are new towers, rising spectacularly to heights of up to 541.3 metres.

No cost has been spared on what, at $700 million, is billed as the world's most expensive memorial - there is special heating and cooling to keep the bronze plates on which the names of victims are recorded at ''comfortable-to-touch'' temperatures year-round.

Lower Manhattan is getting on with life. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is celebrating ''one of the greatest comebacks in American history''.

He lists a near doubling of the population, 19 new hotels, eight new schools, a slew of expanded or new businesses and a restaurant strip on Stone Street.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the economic crisis, New York has returned to what Americans would describe as its ''hard-ass'' self. ''A lot of the compassion and connection between people that we saw in the months after 9/11 has eroded,'' David Friend, a Vanity Fair editor and author of a book on the imagery of the attacks, says. ''There's a buried shell-shock, a hidden sense of trauma - the first reaction to the August 23 earthquake was, 'Is this a terrorist attack?'''

The language is moving on, too. The tallest of the new structures at Ground Zero was to be Freedom Tower. But, according to the New York Post, that caused many to cringe and it has become what realtors judge to be the more marketable 1 World Trade Centre. In New York, too, the term Ground Zero is frowned on because it implied inaction. And Washington does not mention ''the war on terror''.

A word often used to describe the US in the aftermath of the attacks is ''resilient''. Its inclusion in speaking notes issued by the White House for this weekend's commemorations riles the New York Times columnist Edward Rothstein.

''It implies a kind of firm passivity [which is] strange,'' he writes, ''because anyone who has spent time undressing in snaking airport lines before undergoing the kinds of screening associated with convicted felons, knows full well that this has little to do with resilience.''

Friend, whose corporate employers have become one of the first to sign on for space in the new complex, does not see New Yorkers rushing to deep reflection about Osama bin Laden's motives. ''The reaction still is very much 'f--- al-Qaeda','' he says. Here, however, pollsters do detect a shift. The Pew Charitable Trust found that 43 per cent of Americans today, compared with 33 per cent in September 2001, think US wrongdoing might have motivated the attacks.

But this is a development that could be checked for want of news coverage. The war in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $2 billion a week. But, according to the Nieman Watchdog, the country's main TV newscasts devote little more than an average of 21 seconds each bulletin to the conflict.

Likewise, Afghanistan last year commanded just 4 per cent of newspaper news space - significantly more than Iraq at just 1 per cent. Juxtaposed against the Nieman Watchdog's estimate for the US national security bill since the 2001 attacks edging close to $8 trillion, there is a disconnect here that is disturbing.

We'll debate forever how much the world has changed in the past decade, in particular because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have dominated the last 10 years of my career. But the answer emerging from the cacophonous unfolding of events might well be - not a lot.

Led by the US, Western forces proved able invaders, with the initial military campaigns to dislodge the Taliban in Afghanistan and, later, Saddam Hussein in Iraq proving to be logistical marvels.

But as occupiers and nation-builders, the performance was - and is - dismal.

In both cases there were early key markers. In Afghanistan, Washington's failure to send the reinforcements for which forces on the ground pleaded, allowed bin Laden and the top deck of al-Qaeda to escape. In Iraq, absurd decisions to disband the country's security forces and to blacklist anyone who had been a member of Saddam's Baath Party consigned the country to an ugly civil war.

The hubris was breathtaking. Guided by a belief that all would lie down before the virtue of US foreign policy, George Bush's administration set out to reshape the world to its liking, with the then deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz confidently predicting the troops would be back soon - maybe just 30,000-odd forces would be doing a last mopping-up in Iraq no later than the summer of 2004.

Wading through 10 years of policy making, The American Interest's Adam Garfinkle writes: ''And so in the 9/11 decade this is how we got a war against Iraq that destroyed the regional balancer to Iranian hegemonism and did not even stop to ask about the broader implications of a Shiia government in Baghdad … So too did we turn what should have remained a punitive military operation in Afghanistan into, first, an occupation and, then, a quixotic, distracted, chronically underfunded, diffusely managed and thus hopeless nation.''

In focusing on the September 11 decade we also should contrast it with the wider spans of history. And just as Barack Obama has held onto virtually all of the Bush-Cheney policy and security architecture, the policy drivers are historically consistent, according to Melvyn Leffler, writing in Foreign Affairs. ''[The attacks] did not transform the long-term trajectory of US grand strategy,'' he says. ''The US's quest for primacy, its desire to lead the world, its preference for an open door and free markets, its concern with military supremacy, its readiness to act unilaterally when deemed necessary, its eclectic merger of interests and values, its sense of its indispensability - all these remained, and remain unchanged.''

The terrorism specialist Peter Bergen says ''bin Ladenism'' would never enjoy the mass appeal of other destructive ideologies, such as Communism, but is that to say that the West overreacted to the threat? The answer 10 years on would be ''no … and yes''.

No, in terms of assessing the threat embodied in al-Qaeda, but yes in the botched handling of two wars that demonstrably made the counterterrorism challenge of the past decade so much more difficult and complex than it had to be.

Writing last week, the former US assistant secretary of defence Joseph Nye observes: ''A key lesson of 9/11 is that hard military power is essential in countering terrorism by the likes of bin Laden, but that the soft power of ideas and legitimacy is essential for winning the hearts and minds of the mainstream Muslim populations from whom al-Qaeda would like to recruit - a 'smart power' strategy does not ignore the tools of soft power.''

The decade was almost too neatly bookended by the September 11 attacks and the death in May this year of bin Laden in a textbook-perfect raid by a US Navy SEAL force into Pakistan.

Bin Laden went to his grave perhaps only half appreciating the error of his way. Just as the US believed it might counter the al-Qaeda ideas with brute force, the Saudi terrorist believed he could impose them with the suicide bomb and mass murder.

But this year there has been less al-Qaeda violence than in any since 2001 and The Guardian quotes a British security source: ''Al-Qaeda has been hollowed out - of the top 10 people we were interested in a few years ago, only one is still alive.''

Al-Qaeda inflicted what the terrorism expert Michael Scheuer describes as a near-mortal self-inflicted wound in its brutal slaughter of thousands of Muslims in Iraq. Referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the movement's leader in Iraq, Scheuer writes: ''One of al-Qaeda's own all but mortally wounded the organisation and helped save Washington and its allies from even greater disaster in Iraq.''

The al-Qaeda leader made an even greater error in reckoning on the support of Muslim youth. In the aftermath of the attacks on the US, he called for the passing of the baton in a multi-generational jihad. ''We have been struggling right from our youth,'' he wrote, ''[and now] the whole of the Muslim ummah [nation] is depending (after Allah) upon the Muslim youth'' who, he predicted elsewhere would see his death as ''a beacon that arouses the zeal and determination of my followers.''

It didn't happen. Instead, the world has been transfixed for the past nine months by what is called the Arab Spring or awakening and Nigel Inkster, a former deputy director of Britain's MI6, declares that ''bin Laden's ideas of setting the Muslim world ablaze and sparking a global insurgency have been and gone''. Here there's an important caveat - and this is where the global response to the Arab awakening might be a better measure of the extent to which we have changed that our conduct in response to the terrorist attacks.

Right now, Washington and other Western capitals are doing what they have always done - picking winners and losers in the Arab revolts according to their vested interest, not those of the local populations. Libya, Egypt and Tunisia - good; Syria, Bahrain and Yemen - bad.

But if the people of these ''bad'' countries are left to their fate, under the heel of the likes of Syria's Bashar al-Assad, it would be hard to blame them if they were to turn to the remnants of al-Qaeda, a movement which wants to see off the Arab autocrats as badly as the West does.

Noman Benotman, a senior Libyan militant and bin Laden associate-turned-analyst, worries that if hopes raised by the Arab spring are dashed, the youth of countries stretching from Morocco through to Pakistan, where favourable opinion of the US registers as low as 10 per cent, might well turn back to bin Laden.