New America Media, Commentary, Yoichi Shimatsu, Posted: Sep 10, 2011

"Where were you?" stories are useless, since 6 billion people had to be somewhere on September 11. Other than those individuals caught up in the disaster sites, everyone else was basically irrelevant to the event. Me, too, since I was on an airplane that afternoon departing Pakistan, which was a world away and had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

Over the three weeks up to America's great spectacle, I was traveling with an independent media team in northern Kashmir. The titanic battle of Kargil between Pakistan-based mujahedeen and the Indian military had been fought a couple of years earlier along the Line of Control that separates once-independent Kashmir into warring zones controlled by India and Pakistan. The armed struggle to liberate Islamic areas in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir was on everyone's mind in the South Asian region, with guerrilla raids occurring at least once a week.

Afghanistan was then on the back burner. The United Nations was organizing a blockade to enforce economic sanctions. Osama bin Laden, the Saudi jihadist who supported the Afghan fight against Soviet occupation, was in retirement after being forced to leave East Africa. At that quiet moment, the U.S. Navy had long ceased firing cruise missiles against his training bases in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. A de facto truce was holding. Kashmir was the story, not Afghanistan.

In a forested village close to the Himalayan ridge that marked the border with Indian-controlled Kashmir, our team had tea with a soft-spoken Pakistani Army corporal who calmy told us how he shot dead around a hundred Indian soldiers on a single night during the Kargil conflict.

Did he have remorse for those deaths, considering that some might have been Muslims?

His answer: "They were attacking us, so I shouldn't feel bad. Besides it was stupid of their commander to follow the orders to retrieve a shot-down fighter jet. They were just coming up the hill. Shooting them was too easy."

Omen from the Deep

Earlier, our first stop was Karachi, the violence-plagued port city. On that day of our arrival, a bomb blast ripped a bank and a terrorist chieftain facing trial was shot outside the courthouse. Along the sandy shoreline, cameraman Cliff Parker spotted the oddest sight - a giant sea turtle. It was dead, turning black as flies buzzed around its glassy eyes. A passing camel driver told us that the huge creature had emerged from the Arabian Sea five days earlier, crawled to this spot and died.

I asked: "Was it injured? Diseased?"

The camel man shook his head. "Nothing. It just crawled here and died."

We stood around staring at this mystery from the deep as if it had popped out of an inter-dimensional wormhole. The thought came to mind and I blurted out: "This is an omen of a coming catastrophe on a cosmic scale. It has something to do with the oil industry."

Cliff walked away in silence and mounted the camel for a ride along the beach.

A Self-Absorbed Region

Later, we learned more about Karachi's endless troubles on a jeep ride with a Pakistani intelligence officer. The young captain explained that he had been hit by four bullets during a raid on the offices of MQM (Muttahida Quami Movement), a political movement of Muslims who had emigrated from India.

"These rascals were involved in all sorts of criminal doings and we suspected they were receiving funds from India's spy agency to destabilize Pakistan," he said. "If this keeps up, there is going to be a war."

Thus, the picture of Pakistan on the eve of September 11 was, on a thumbnail: The South Asian region  boiling over with troubles of its own, nobody having energy left to tangle with a superpower like the USA, the Taliban not being a factor outside their own troubled land, and Osama bin Laden in quiet retirement.

Clubbing after a Disaster

On that evening, the jetliner landed at Bangkok's Dunmuang airport and I reached city center in time for a posh Italian dinner with a couple of Japanese friends. A murmur was felt while I stabbed a tortellini, and the waiter in a hushed voice said, "Something's happened in New York."

After bidding the ladies an early good night, I caught up with cameraman Cliff Parker, who excitedly shouted: "The World Trade Center is gone!"

My response: "Disappeared? I never liked the building anyway. It never really fit into New York."

"No, seriously planes hit it! Two of them. The twin towers collapsed. What should we do?"

I guess this calls for a beer.

We headed for some tourist traps. Americans and their wives were inside a Patpong club for spectator sport. Some rich Arabs garbed in Euro designer wear were leering through the G-strings. Amid the blaring music and noise of party goers, the thoughts were too gigantic to digest. The monstrous towers in New York were demolished by these urban realities here, not by those salt-of-the-earth people in Pakistan or Afghanistan. It's our problem, not theirs since they have enough of their own.

Somehow a PR genius -- with some oil company, no doubt -- decided to pin the blame on Afghanistan, which coincidentally was resisting the U.S. government's plans to install a cross-country pipeline. Now, after a decade of countless deaths in the Afghan War, it's come to light that the advance team that planned the attack came from Qatar, a U.S. corporate partner in the natural gas business and co-sponsor of the Jasmine Revolution. Of course, the Navy's not going to fire missiles into America's rich ally Doha.

The real culprits were the lobbyists, energy executives, their politician lackeys, their hacks in academia and the security companies -- the sort of people who blow taxpayer dollars inside Bangkok bars and New York lounges and never stop to sbreak bread with donkey drivers in the dust of South Asia.

As for 9/11, the towers went down and the rest is all lies. Alhamdulillah, I wasn't inside.

Yoichi Shimatsu, a Hong Kong-based freelance journalist and environmental consultant, is a former associate editor with Pacific News Service.