Grounds for optimism are hard to come by as the curtain descends on the initial decade of the 21st century, but what’s even harder to conjure up is an accurate image of how future historians will perceive the first 10 years of the third millennium.

To those who lived through it, the period from 1901 to 1910 was hardly inconsequential, for instance, but what followed in the next decade subsequently consolidated the impression that, for all effective purposes, the 20th century began in 1914.
It is perfectly possible that the shape of things to come will relegate to a sideshow the most notable events of the recent past. But the likelihood of that prospect will depend on what horrors lie in store. The eruption of a conflict on a scale considerably grander than anything we have lately witnessed could, of course, retrospectively transform the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as all the instances of terrorism since September 11, 2001, into something of a sideshow.
Despite the dire state of affairs in various parts of the world, there appear to be no firm grounds, broadly speaking, for particularly catastrophic prognostications about the decade ahead.
Sure, the shape of the endgames in Iraq and Afghanistan-Pakistan remains nebulous. The Obama administration occasionally seems keen to extricate itself from both these conflicts, but is finding it hard to figure out how.
The ostensible end of U.S.-led combat operations in Iraq hasn’t exactly ended the chaos in that country, and recent reports of a spurt in the exodus of Iraqi Christians — who did not feel all that beleaguered before the regime change in 2003 — reinforces the impression of long-term instability.
Afghanistan is even worse off, and it’s not just because the Bush administration took its eyes off the ball in order to pursue a wholly unnecessary war in Iraq.
The recent eagerness to negotiate with the Taliban is effectively a concession that the 2001 invasion was misconceived. An altogether more logical — and probably more fruitful — reaction to the 9/11 outrage would have been a special forces operation specifically targeting al-Qaeda. That may not have put paid to Islamic fundamentalist violence, but chances are it would have undermined it to a considerable extent.
Before long it’ll be a full 10 years since George W. Bush vowed to smoke out Osama bin Laden, who remains at large -- unless, of course, he’s dead. The fact that he remains unfound, alive or dead, casts reasonable doubt on the quality of American intelligence in the terrain in Pakistan’s northwest where its drones ‘accurately’ target terrorists with monotonous regularity.
Meanwhile, it is arguably ominous that the Pakistan phase of the Afghan war is increasingly being equated with the bombing of Cambodia as part of the Vietnam war. Some of the parallels are indeed striking, and it’s worth recalling the consequential takeover by the fanatical Khmer Rouge -- a scourge from which Cambodia was delivered only through eventual Vietnamese military intervention.
There are, of course, many other significant events and developments that have occurred since 2001 -- which began with Bush’s inauguration as the 43rd president of the U.S., based not on a popular verdict but on a Supreme Court decision. The rarely mentioned conflicts in Somalia and Yemen, for instance, are part of what he initially dubbed the war on terror. But perhaps the almost unprecedented degree of opprobrium that Bush attracted internationally is a more intriguing component of the past decade’s narrative.
The outbreak of hostilities in Iraq was preceded by some of the largest anti-war mobilizations in western capitals. Unfortunately, the protests petered out once it turned out they were having no effect on the policies of Bush and Tony Blair, although it’s possible that sustained demonstrations on a sufficiently large scale could have made a difference -- before the dastardly terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, inter alia, changed the popular mood.
It is equally possible that had the popular pressure for progressive change that propelled Barack Obama into the White House been renewed following his inauguration, he would have felt less obliged to lean rightwards in the context of domestic reform.
The significance of his election as the first African-American president will no doubt be diminished should he fail to be returned to power in 2012, amid 150th anniversary commemorations of the Civil War which ostensibly ended slavery in the U.S. — although it would be another century before the descendants of slaves could realistically embrace expectations of equal rights.
Some things take a long time to change. Among these is the notion that there is no serious alternative to free-market capitalism, which helps to explain why the common reaction to systemic crises is to bolster the very institutions that helped to propel it. There will be plenty of eyes on the European Union in the years ahead, as there will be on China, India and Brazil, with their impressive growth patterns as well as persisting political and economic contradictions.
One of the biggest disappointments of the past decade has been the world’s failure to come to grips with the prospect of climate change, with the recent Cancun conference underlining the tendency to do too little -- and here again the chief culprit is the capitalist tendency to be suspicious of anything that interferes with profiteering.
(Source: Dawn