It’s been a horrid year for the American exchequer. Some $37 billion — yes billions — have gone into their ‘War Against Terrorism’ since September last. For the next 10 years, they are staged to spend $443 billion, averaging more than $40 billion a year, which means two per cent of their 2-trillion-dollar annual budget. Blown away, are we?

Yes. Convolutely, their chickens will come home to us to roost. The poor and the wretched, the deprived and the desperate, the young and the talented oozing with dreams of a better tomorrow — men, women and nations on earth will pay the price and suffer the strike that changed America in a heartbeat and stripped it of its pomp and pride.

One year is too soon to wager what exactly lies ahead. For Pakistan, who can say? Except, Pervaiz Musharraf continues to be “tight” with the Bush administration; interior minister, Moeenuddin Haider, a wanted man by the CIA and FBI agents crawling all over his jurisdiction; interest waiver on the $3 billion loaned to us by the US; reopening of USAID office for a life-saving blood transfusion for our comatose population and social development programmes, and a few other freebies for hoi polloi which Uncle Sam has yet to pull out from his tricolour hat.

They have deep pockets. And sure, they have built up a tidy piggy bank in flush times by making greed a virtue. Capitalist America has worshipped free enterprise and strode through the globe, a neo-conqueror, laden with booty cribbed from lesser beings around the world. America sells death to us for billions in weapons with one hand, and gives charity from the other.

Getting a deal is what America loves most. Making a quick buck from savvy-less souls is what America glorifies most. Negotiating over nickel and dimes with economic funks is what makes America tick.

Don’t we know there’s no such thing as a free lunch? America extorts its price. It wants a quid pro quo for the dollars it doles out to countries like ours. Islamabad — second time around — is America’s frontline state battling Osama bin Laden’s lashkar, those hardened criminals who kill with car bombs, something alien to our home-grown terrorists. Previously, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, as political analyst John Pilger writes, were the bases of the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, which, with a treasury of $4bn and the secret approval of the White House, effectively created the mujahideen that attacked America.

The joke doing the rounds here is the shape of the recovery from the economic slump. The U-shape denotes a slow recovery, while a V-shape means that the recovery is sharp and fast. But now a third letter has been introduced: the letter W. Fears are afoot that the recovery may be W-shaped or a double-dipped downturn. George W. Bush’s Texan drawl has earned him the nickname ‘Dubya’, because this is how he pronounces his middle name ‘W’. Economists here ask: “Is there a Dubya recession on the horizon?”

Wall Street smarts are already saying that the stock market — in its fifth month of heading south — isn’t turning around soon. Those who have pulled out their money from the schizod market and invested it in real estate are now fearing that this, too, will become a bubble which must eventually burst. With mortgage rates lowest in 30 years, everyone around is buying a first or a second home as investment. And the sum? Home prices are touching the sky and surfeit of homes swamping the rental market.

The Labour Day sales recently failed to entice consumers to shop till they drop. Sure, there were grabbers crawling all over, yet leery of letting their passions run away, they held tight to their wallets. Downsizing is the monster these days and getting the sack is everyone’s living nightmare. Such financial insecurity is the exact opposite of what the doctor ordered for economic recovery.

‘Dubya’, meanwhile, has declared Sept 11 as ‘Patriots’ Day’ — whatever that means. As immigrants, all we know is the USA Patriot Act of Attorney-General Ashcroft which has left Muslims, specially Pakistanis, running for cover. Former president, Jimmy Carter, is the latest to denounce it by writing in the Washington Post: “Detaining American citizens as ‘enemy combatants’, incarcerating them secretly and indefinitely without their being charged with any crime or having the right to legal counsel...this policy has been condemned by the federal courts, but the Justice Department seems adamant, and the issue is still in doubt. These actions are similar to those of abusive regimes that historically have been condemned by American presidents.”

Immigrating to America — forget it! Americans have tightened their laws and made it well neigh impossible for Pakistanis to cross the Atlantic. And those miserable illegal hundreds already hunkered down while shadowed by the FBI in the US have gotten the rough end of the stick. While the US has over 300,000 visa violators today, its single-minded pursuit of Pakistanis to be picked up and shipped back is highly unjust.

And the Pakistani-Americans? Well, their lives, too, have morphed for the worse. Discrimination at work, public places and in neighbourhoods is, today, not uncommon for them. They pay equal taxes, yet society denies them the same status as their white counterparts. Fearing a racial backlash, the local Islamic centres and mosques urge Muslims to lie low on and around 9/11.

Still as death is the sullen vacuum left behind by the Towers. To the beholder, they were the icon of American surrealistic invulnerability: of limitless power, unimaginable wealth and global supremacy. Miles before approaching New York City, the World Trade Centre could be seen standing, shaving the sky as if challenging its Creator.

They have gone and taken with them the lovely NYC skyline: “The two front teeth have been knocked out from the Big Apple,” said a Pakistani besotted by Manhattan. “End of pilgrimage for me.”

“Most of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, a US protectorate. Saudi Arabia is the home of the Bin Laden family, who were clients of George Bush Sr in his capacity as consultant for the huge Carlyle Group, which has extensive oil interests. Oil and America’s struggle to defeat the Soviet Union were at the heart of it,” says Pilger.

“Al Qaeda took root in Saudi Arabia among those of the ruling families who opposed the Fahd family’s deals with the United States, which they saw as a Faustian pact. ‘The day the bubble burst’ is how many in the Arab world who understood these tensions describe Sept 11.”

The combined forces of the supercult of Americanism — from the Washington fundamentalists themselves to the unctuous reporters standing in front of the White House — want us to believe that the events on that day “changed the world”, providing an appendix to Francis Fukuyama’s scam about the end of history. The world did not change. The thrust of American military and economic power merely accelerated, along with the assault on social democracy. And just as Fukuyama’s nonsense has been discredited, so will Sept 11 as another “end of history”, Pilger asserts.

Until America turns inward and undertakes a spiritual journey to singe out arrogance and replace it with compassion (not the compassionate conservatism that Bush gloats about), there cannot be a closure to Sept 11. Nor can the rest of the world take a break!