That said, an Osama bin Laden conducting a posthumous review of the past decade would have cause to feel satisfied. Although he did not create the caliphate he dreamed of, one of his main declared aims was to draw America into “bleeding wars” in the Muslim lands, and in this he most cruelly succeeded. But for September 11th, America would not have invaded Afghanistan or Iraq, where some 6,000 of its soldiers, and many of its allies’ soldiers, have lost their lives in grinding wars of attrition. The costs-of-war project at Brown University thinks that on a “very conservative” estimate about 137,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan and that the wars have created more than 7.8m refugees in these countries. The Brown project puts the wars’ ultimate cost, including interest payments and veterans’ care, to the United States at up to $4 trillion—equivalent to the country’s cumulative budget deficits for the six years from 2005 to 2010.

America has precious little to show for this sacrifice apart from the disruption of al-Qaeda. Iraq is in better shape than looked possible at the height of the sectarian slaughter that engulfed it soon after the American invasion. But on a single day recently al-Qaeda was able to launch 42 attacks across the country. And when the last American troops depart at the end of this year, they will leave behind a country that is neither a close friend (the government of Nuri al-Maliki looks more readily to Iran) nor a full democracy. It is true that when America toppled Saddam Hussein it rid Iraq of dictatorship, not just a dictator. The country’s new rulers say that they are democrats, and Iraq has held elections galore. But its politicians have yet to show a proper respect for the rights of minorities or a willingness to let the people vote them out of office.

The democratic ideal has lately found its way to the Arab world from another direction, by way of the Arab spring. In so far as this marks a repudiation of al-Qaeda’s doctrine, it should eventually be good for the West as well as for the Arabs—provided the jihadists do not hijack the democratic spring when autumn sets in. But the West cannot claim the credit for this awakening. It was certainly not inspired by the invasion of Iraq (which this newspaper, wrongly certain that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, strongly supported). Most Arabs opposed the invasion, dismissed Iraq’s new government as a puppet and resented George Bush’s “freedom agenda”. People’s power did not stir in Tunisia, Egypt and the wider Arab world until almost a decade later, and then it was because of the eruption of long-simmering local frustrations, not because of America’s display of “shock and awe” in Mesopotamia.

As for Afghanistan, America has for the present achieved its principal aims of chasing out al-Qaeda and overthrowing its Taliban protectors. When al-Qaeda and the Taliban established a new haven over the border in Pakistan, the CIA’s drones took the fight to them there as well. But the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan smoulders on, and it remains an open question how long the feckless administration the West props up in Kabul will survive NATO’s planned departure in 2014.

Meanwhile the price of pushing al-Qaeda to the brink of strategic defeat has been to create a new danger. By pursuing the jihadists into Pakistan, America has helped to destabilise a paranoid, nuclear-armed country of 190m Muslims. America is not solely to blame for this: Pakistan has played an exasperating double game, accepting American money with one hand while abetting assorted jihadists with the other. Its spies may well have known where bin Laden was hiding, which is why Mr Obama sent in the SEALs without permission or warning. Since the raid, relations have darkened. But even before it, far more Pakistanis saw America as an enemy than as a partner. America’s homeland may be safer than it was ten years ago, but its strategic posture has deteriorated in a swathe of the Middle East and South Asia, and will worsen further if Iraq falls under the spell of the mullahs’ Iran, or Pakistan implodes.

(to be continued)今天911，选的文章较长，各位见谅了