After a human tragedy, the debri is cleared, remains of lives gathered and mourned and then every year, we revisit in our mind, the Ground Zero of grief and loss and try to make sense of it. Tragedies where innocent lives are lost cannot be contextualised and justified. But yes, some tragedies are better documented than others. Records tell us just how many people died on the ghastly morning of September 11, 2001. There are names and stories and tributes to acknowledge sons, daughters, wives, husbands, loved ones who were taken away suddenly and in an act of unimaginable evil when two aircrafts loaded with passengers rammed into the heart of New York. On a regular morning which in retrospect was the end of the world as we knew it.

A world where passenger aircrafts could not be imagined as weapons of war and New York had an inviolable skyline with those twin towers ablaze with life, at its centre. A world where only in a movie about an alien attack would you have seen a skyscraper melting into a scrap heap, taking with it forever the sense of safety in one of the world’s richest and best protected cities. Where airports did not resemble inquisition centres, racial profiling was not rampant and every Muslim or Asian was not singled out for a body search. You could fly on an airplane with knitting needles and toe nail clippers. A world that was not organised around the idea,“If you are not with us, you are against us.”

September 11 was just the beginning of a war that continues to pound random countries and claim lives that have nothing to do with what happened that morning. America hasn’t stopped punishing the world for what was taken away from it 10 years ago.  The unilateral war against Iraq, continued US interventions in Afghanistan and Pakistan have caused human rights abuses and international law violations. Where are the television tributes and was there even a body count to gauge just how many people, nameless and unaccounted for died to pay for 9/11?

Post 9/11, America has initiated two wars, spent trillions on just destroying   Iraq, sacrificed thousands of American troops and caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan. A video posted by Wikileaks showed how the crew of an AH-64 Apache helicopter in Baghdad bantered about a 20-something photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, along with his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40, mistook them for armed insurgents and then shot them and 10 others in July 2007.

Sentences like, “Ha, ha, ha — I hit ’em”  and “Look at those dead bastards” were bandied around, two children were also wounded in the continued air attack and their father was killed too while trying to help the victims. And it was all justified with a,“Well, it’s their fault for bringing kids into a battle.”

We won’t know if any memorials were built to commemorate these lives but it is clear that a country that defines terror as a cowardly attack on innocent citizens, forgets to include itself in the definition when it does exactly the same on foreign soils. It is amazing with what self-serving naivety American TV shows celebrate “our boys who are fighting for our freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

America’s moral righteousness while killing Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan was summed up by film maker and writer Michael Moore, “The Nazis killed tens of MILLIONS. They got a trial. Why? Because we’re not like them. We’re Americans. We roll different.”  Moore also asked if what America wanted was just the death of a mad man or the end of the killing. All the killing.

What and who have we become if we celebrate the death blow against an enemy but never ask when peace will come? A peace that is inclusive and not exclusive? Like Moore said, “There can be no celebration for the end of the Afghanistan War because the war isn’t ending. The war must continue! Even though our own CIA tells us there are no more than a few dozen al Qaeda left in Afghanistan. We still have 100,000 troops there fighting a few dozen crazies?”

The retribution continues. The families of the unfortunate men and women who died an incomprehensible death 10 years ago on September 11, must feel a great deal of relief because of that.  And if not, then who is this war for? And when will it stop creating generations of angry victims who may want to grow up as Osama Bin Laden?

Reema Moudgil is the author of  Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870?affid=unboxedwri )