DAWN Editorials 11th September 2026

After Sept 11

A QUARTER of a century since the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, the world continues to feel the effects of that epochal event. The US response to the attacks on its soil went beyond a counterterrorism operation. It metastasised into a sprawling imperial ‘crusade’ that laid to waste countries that had nothing to do with the terrorists who had hijacked the American airliners.

In fact, the US misadventure in Iran is a continuation of these flawed policies. Today, the world is no safer from religiously inspired terrorism than it was 25 years ago, reflecting the futility of the American-led ‘global war on terror’ and its modern-day iterations.

Soon after the attacks, Muslims, including Arabs, in the US faced intense discrimination. Matters may have improved in some respects; after all, New York City, which was the epicentre of the terrorist attacks, today has elected a Muslim mayor. But conversely, Islamophobia in the US is currently at historic levels, spiking after the launch of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in 2023. The current US administration has contributed to this bias, with many of President Donald Trump’s close confidantes spewing reprehensible views. Big Tech, too, has played a significant role in mainstreaming anti-Muslim hate across the larger West.

In the field of foreign policy, little has changed. Post-Sept 11, Washington launched invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the first instance, after a two-decade nation-building experiment, the Americans beat a hasty retreat, leaving Kabul to the Afghan Taliban who returned to power. In Iraq, the US occupation resulted in a vicious sectarian war, which paved the way for the rise of the self-styled Islamic State group. IS was arguably even more brutal than Al Qaeda, the outfit the Americans had sought to crush for carrying out the Sept 11 attacks. Though its abilities stand diminished today, IS continues to threaten global security, putting a question mark over America’s transnational counterterrorism campaign.

Following George W. Bush, even ‘liberal’ presidents, such as the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Barack Obama, backed regime-change operations in Libya and Syria. Today, both remain broken states. Despite some bitter lessons, the current US president champions American exceptionalism, and violates the sovereignty of other nations in pursuit of his nebulous goals.

Where the Iranian misadventure is concerned, the reasons cited for Washington’s aggression have kept changing. America’s ‘war on terror’, in fact, spawned even more lethal terrorist groups, while leaving in its wake gulags such as Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, alongside populations in several Muslim countries grappling with the residue of collapsed states. The post-Sept 11 period offers lessons in imperial overreach, and how not to fight terrorism. But as its actions continue to show, the US has learnt no lessons at all.

Published in Dawn, September 11th, 2026

Towards dystopia

FIRST, AI became capable. It began demonstrating surprising capabilities in generating text, images, code and analysis. Then it became autonomous. It started using tools, navigating systems and working around set objectives. Now, it is getting too difficult to control. Experts warn it has become difficult to understand how AI systems arrive at the answers they provide, and say their behaviour is becoming harder to predict. AI has also been acquiring capabilities that could be dangerous: the ability to launch cyberattacks, for example, or compress a lifetime’s worth of research onto a machine, or the ability to replicate autonomously, or to coordinate behaviour with other AI systems in pursuit of common goals. Reality is now starting to resemble the beginning of a dystopian science fiction novel but, instead of applying the brakes and taking a moment to understand where the near-exponential improvements in AI are leading humanity, tech companies and their leaders are becoming increasingly invested in what has started to resemble an AI arms race. It is an arms race that some researchers say could eventually drive all of humanity to extinction.

A researcher at Anthropic, one of the foremost companies in AI development, resigned this week, citing concerns that his company and its competitors are not acting responsibly enough. Jacob Coxon, the researcher in question, believes both Anthropic and its rival OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, are more obsessed with besting each other and their global competition than worrying about what safety risks the extremely advanced AI models they are releasing pose to the public. It bears mentioning that, this summer, OpenAI’s AI models broke out of their testing environment and coordinated a multi-step cyberattack targeting Hugging Face, an AI development platform. The incident prompted widespread concerns about AI agents ‘going rogue’ and potentially causing real-world harm. More recent disclosures suggest that AI agents from multiple labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, have broken out of containment far more frequently than originally reported. Taken as a whole, this presents a worrying picture, but there may yet be time to act. Instead of going to war, AI companies must recognise the imminent danger from unchecked development and collaborate on establishing a ceiling on AI capabilities till they figure out how to control what they are creating. The future of humanity itself might be at stake.

Published in Dawn, September 11th, 2026

Housing finance

THE property survey ordered by the prime minister to identify plots eligible for mortgage under the Apna Ghar Scheme addresses only a small part of the housing finance problem. Banks have approved 53,127 — worth Rs313.42bn — of the 147,504 applications received. But they have disbursed only Rs45.43bn to 8,739 borrowers. Barely 16pc of the approved borrowers have received the money, and disbursements amount to around 14pc of the approved value. The gap between approval and disbursement deserves greater official scrutiny. The survey may widen the pool of eligible collateral, but it cannot by itself persuade banks to assume more credit risk at the expense of the shareholders. Commercial banks, apart from state-owned banks, remain wary of lending against property, because recovering loans after default is a laborious process.

This legal weakness is why housing loans make up less than 1pc of total bank lending in Pakistan, far below that in comparable economies, where quicker recovery allows banks to channel a much larger share of credit into mortgages. Mortgage enforcement reform should be central to the government’s housing strategy. Foreclosure and recovery procedures need to be faster and predictable, while protecting borrowers from arbitrary treatment. Banks will expand housing credit once they are convinced that a mortgage remains a recoverable asset after default. The government should also publish regular data on mortgage loan rejections and undisbursed approvals, explaining what blocks borrowers from receiving funds. Bringing major developers into the scheme cannot substitute for enforcement reforms that make mortgage lending commercially viable. Nor should public-sector banks be left to handle the scheme alone. It may expand disbursements temporarily, but with private banks staying uninvolved it would not build a market that survives. The real test of Apna Ghar is the lasting mortgage credit it generates across the banking industry. Pakistan needs bank lending against property as routine business, not under pressure from the government.

Published in Dawn, September 11th, 2026