IT is two decades after September 11 2001. The first casualties of what came to be named “the war on terror” were the thousands of people at work in New York’s World Trade Centre, the passengers and crew of the aircraft hijacked by the terrorists commanded by Osama bin Laden and the heroic firefighters, first responders, ambulance crews and cops who rushed to the scene.

We should remember the courage of passengers and crew who battled to recover control of their aircraft from the hijackers and died in the failure of their heroic attempt.

It is wearisome to repeat it, such is the fog of mystification and disinformation that surrounds these events, but there were no Afghans involved in the hijacking. The mostly Saudi suicide teams who were trained to fly in the US under the negligent eye of the US secret state owed their allegiance to Saudi terrorists originally trained and funded by that same secret state to challenge the progressive and secular Afghan government and its long-standing Soviet allies.

Britain was complicit in creating this monster regiment and some of its most brutal leaders were hailed as freedom fighters, while a consistent strain of British foreign policy under successive governments — Tory, Labour and Tory-Lib Dem coalition — has been to suck up to the medieval obscurantist Saudi regime, sell it armaments and aircraft, bombs and bullets and trust them to act as gendarmes in defence of an oil industry that provides a tsunami of profits.

The Lancet magazine estimates that near 655,000 Iraqis died during the invasion, war and the long and still existent occupation.

This is the time to recall that it was prime minister Tony Blair, his cohort of professional liars and the phalanx of New labour MPs, who were complicit with the Conservatives in the entirely concocted story that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction with a countdown time of 45 minutes before Britain would be hit.

Not only was this untrue, but the miasma of mystification which implied that the Iraqi dictator and the Saudi-led assassins were in an alliance was equally tendentious. In fact the opposite was the case.

We can attribute the deaths of hundreds of British troops — more than 457 in Afghanistan alone — to these liars. The human cost to British families is not on the scale of the losses suffered by Iraqi and Afghan families but each human tragedy, and the many men with broken bodies and minds, must be added to the price paid for these imperialist adventures.

To the human cost of the Iraq war we must add the quarter of a million Afghans who have died when the focus of Western military intervention shifted firstly to the largely imaginary mountain lair of Osama bin Laden and then to the entirety of this poverty-stricken but strategically important nation.

The United States spent more than $819 billion on the Iraq war. The Afghan war cost the US in excess of $825 billion. For Britain the final bill will be near £50 billion. Measured against the human need in this region and the human casualties that two decades of war have produced, this stands as an obscenity.

The war on terror has been a conspicuous failure. To the military defeat and strategic setback that Nato has experienced in Afghanistan we must account for the fact that jihadist terror groups now operate in an intercontinental arc from western China to into Sub-Saharan Africa and the deranged and deluded adherents to their ideology have a capacity to strike on our soil.

This is the price we pay for the partnership our ruling class desires with US imperialism.