Ex-senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed said on Tuesday that 25 years after 9/11, the United States had emerged weaker, conceding space to China and Muslim “middle powers” in the Middle East had become relevant in a transformed world.
The biggest change was that before 9/11, the US was the “sole superpower” but that was no longer the case at present.
Sayed delivered his remarks during a talk hosted by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), a local think tank in Islamabad. In his presentation, Sayed presented a fact sheet on ‘9/11 in 25, the date that changed the world’, which quoted a study conducted by Brown University stating that the US had squandered $8 trillion in 20 years after 9/11. The US response after 9/11 resulted in 38 million people being displaced and at least five million direct or indirect deaths, as well as 324,000 drones, bombs and missiles expended in battlefront countries like Afghanistan, the former FATA region in Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Lebanon.
