A divided world remembers Sept. 11, 2001

Other voices
Israel’s Haaretz daily expressed disappointment and cynicism in an op-ed piece that said: “This is Sept. 11 five years later: a political tool in the hands of the Bush administration.”

In Southeast Asia, U.S. and Philippine troops fighting Islamic extremists in the jungles prayed for peace and safety, as other remembrances took place in Japan, Australia, Finland, South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who won the country’s first post-Taliban election in 2004, expressed the appreciation of the Afghan people to the U.S. for the “sacrifices of your sons and daughters” in rebuilding his country. But on the streets in the capital, Kabul, many Afghans grumbled that they had not seen much improvement.

Despite about 20,000 U.S. forces fighting al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, and about the same number of NATO troops, and billions in aid, a resurgent Taliban resistance has shaken the country, while corruption has stymied development.

In neighboring Pakistan, considered a major ally in the U.S.-led war on terror, newspapers ran bleak-toned opinion columns and editorials criticizing Western anti-terror policies and attitudes.

Hardline lawmakers in Pakistan blamed the five-year U.S. counterattack for “destroying peace in the entire world.”

China, accused of using an anti-terror campaign to crack down on peaceful dissent, issued no official statement on the anniversary. But government-linked scholars said the Iraq invasion has been a painful and ultimately unsuccessful diversion, while American foreign policies continue to alienate many in the Muslim world.

“The way the United States wrongly reacted to the incident — especially in the form of the Iraqi War — has had the bigger impact on the world,” Yuan Peng, deputy director of Chinese Institute of Contemporary International Relations, said in an editorial in the People’s Daily newspaper.

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