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That day ten years ago today when airliners exploded into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon marked a signpost in history. It was such a seminal event that everything after that now happens in the "post 9/11 world".

Despite overwhelming sympathy for the shocking attack and the loss of life, America's rulers squandered the moral high ground by plunging into a dirty revenge war in Iraq for which it made up evidence of weapons of mass destruction. It is slowly extricating itself from Iraq, but is bogged down in the Afghan quagmire.

In the run-up to the tenth anniversary, commentators are saying of the 9/11 attacks that the United States did it to itself, and that the country never learnt from its mistakes. All the root causes of anti-Americanism in the Middle East (US backing for Israeli occupation of Palestine, its support for conservative dictators to ensure the supply of cheap oil, its indiscriminate use of military firepower) are still there. Some would say the anger at America is greater now than ten years ago.

The self-fulfilling prophecy of a clash of civilisations is coming true because of ill-advised foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.Despite tighter airport security and the removal of Osama bin Laden, America isn't more secure because it hasn't bothered to look at the underlying causes of terrorism. The cost of waging a worldwide war on terror has essentially bankrupted America and contributed to its current political paralysis.

Gone are the days when the United States could deploy its military anywhere in the world and not worry about the consequences. If the US has monopolised violence as a means of compliance for this long, the rise of the non-state actors have ended that monopoly. And if the powerful states have misused globalisation to intrude upon lives of people in distant lands, their adversaries have developed a similar capacity to strike back globally. It doesn't matter if American cruise missiles are guided if its foreign policy is misguided.

And it's not just America that has become more vulnerable, it has exported its insecurity to its allies around the world. Here in the subcontinent, the war on terror has sucked Pakistan into the maelstrom of terror so it can't now be a part of America's exit strategy from Afghanistan. Pakistan's instability makes India vulnerable, and the dominos keep tumbling.

The elimination of Bin Laden may ultimately give the Americans a face-saving exit from Afghanistan, but it still needs someone to police the region. Pakistan could have done it, but is falling apart. So the Americans have turned to India, making it the target of jihadist terror. This weeks attack on Delhi's High Court is the latest in series of attack India has witnessed in the recent years.

Nepal gets sucked into this because every time there is a terrorist attack in India, the media there is full of intelligence leaks that the attackers slipped in through the open Nepal border. At a meeting with visiting Nepali editors in Delhi in July, Home Minister P Chidambaram devoted all his time talking about security.

The mistakes America has made on the global scale, India is making at a regional level. One of the enduring after-effects of 9/11 on South Asia has been Washington's outsourcing of regional security to New Delhi. And in many ways India is behaving locally like the global bully America is. It's not without reason that the IPKF debacle in Sri Lanka is called "India's Vietnam".

The failure to see terrorism as a by-product of bad governance that manifests into violent excesses has led to stigmatisation of communities for their religious and political beliefs. States fail to see how terror groups exploit individual grievances to carry out such strikes, and instead look to pre-empt attacks through suppression rather than prevention.

Closer to home, ethnic tensions, the bombing of churches and desecration of mosques are all initial signals of seething grievances. Terrorism can be countered only when states police their citizens less and govern them more. Brute force will not reduce injustice, in fact there is evidence it will make it worse. The solution is to address wrongs before the extremist few choose to redress them using violence and terror.

Read also:
The price of 9/11, JOSEPH E STIGLITZ
George W Bush's war on terror was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit