Part 20 - Brave New World, Part 1
By the time 2000 reached the world, there was a number of things becoming obvious to the world - the immense financial and economic clout of the West was being challenged by newcomers to the world, and that the centers of the modern West - America, Europe and the Commonwealth - weren't objecting to this, in many cases because facilitating it was making these countries wealthy and their elites in many cases incredibly rich. The tech world's 1990s and 2000s boom, despite its spectacular 2000-2001 bust, had resulted in hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables laid in North America, Europe, Japan, Korea and Australia, and the growth of internet traffic that was to come in the following two decades simply wouldn't have been possible without that infrastructure, and the growth of mobile communications that began in the West in the second half of the 1990s rapidly blew across the developed world and then with even greater speed blew across the less-developed portions of the world in the 2000s. Such communications would bring about vast social changes in nations all across the globe, and economics would supercharge many of the effects.
For the Commonwealth of Nations, the new millenium dawn with them having out of both desire and necessity seek to advance the interests of its less-wealthy members, but this was not proving to be hard in the slightest. Made ludicrously rich by both immense natural resource wealth, proper management of it and not a small amount of economic nationalism, Canada was every bit an equal to the United Kingdom in global affairs, and Australia, who had been full-stop copying many of Canada's social and economic tactics for decades, was standing up right next to their Commonwealth brothers, and the Commonwealth wasn't hurt by the fact that its two largest pet projects - India and South Africa - were both in the midst of vast economic booms that were in the former's case advancing a country that viewed itself as a potential superpower and in the latter case building a whole new world in a nation that had a dark past. Having joined the Commonwealth in 1989, Israel had rapidly established itself as a Central Commonwealth member to such a degree that the Israelis by the millenium viewed London, Ottawa and Canberra as being every bit as important a connection as Washington. Both Ottawa and London also had considerable influence upon the European Union, born of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty out of a desire to ensure a lasting peace through social interchange, economic prosperity and global influence for the nations of Europe who had been sparring with each other on a regular basis for centuries. Having been on a spectacular upward trajectory in the 1980s only to have Tiananmen Square and the collapse first of the Japanese asset bubble and then Korea's famed (or infamous depending on the perspective) chaebols cause them to have a troubled 1990s, Asia in 2000 had taken stock of its situation, and Japan in particular saw its future prosperity being ensured by beating out the affluent West in their own fields, primarily electronics, automobiles, aerospace technologies and shipbuilding, though they would not find this going easy. China, who by the end of the 1990s was seeing that Tiananmen Square and the Hong Kong Crisis had become spectacular screwups even in their judgement, would spend the 2000s rebuilding its relations with the West, though by then it would be clear that the vast economic growth through industrialization that could have been theirs was an opportunity lost forever, lost most of all to India but also to Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran and southern and eastern Africa.
For Canada, by 2000 the wealthiest nation per capita among larger nations on Earth (with a GDP/capita of some $53,770), the decades-long project of improving its territories in the Caribbean mostly complete, the desires for multiculturalism and multilingualism (though with plenty of common symbols, interests, images and desires being part of the equation, of course) paying vast dividends, Native Canadians being part of Canadian society on practically every level and Canadians of other races being every bit the equal of whites, the country was ready to slug way above its weight in social terms as well as economic ones, and they wanted it in every way possible. The legalization of same-sex marriage and all of the benefits afforded to married couples in 1997 was a landmark ruling for the LGBT community even in a country where public bigotry tended to be highly unhelpful to one's position in society. Canada by the late 1990s was aiming to advance its own society in terms of social cohesion and wealth, and its foreign policy was aimed primarily at advancing human rights and democracy even in areas where the two didn't tend to mix with local customs or governments all that well, particualrly in Africa. Despite that, the once-deeply conservative elements of Canadian society were by the millenium much changed themselves, and even in the prairie provinces, whose societal changes had been far slower than Ontario, Quebec, the coastal regions or the islands, was shifting dramatically, in large part owing to the fact that Native Canadians tended to be considerably more socially liberal than their predominantly-white neighbors and they were a very sizable portion of the population in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Northern Ontario.
Of particular success to Canada in the dying days of the 20th Century had been its influence in the final peace deals in Northern Ireland, along with the United States. Veteran Canadian diplomat Jean-Michel Desharnais and his American counterpart, George Mitchell, would ultimately be instrumental in developing many elements of the Northern Ireland peace process, including helping to draft the Mitchell Principles in January 1996, and with Desharnais and Mitchell being the chairmen of the talks that ultimately culminated in the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, agreed to on April 10, 1998. While the initial process of sorting out the agreements was at times rocky, the IRA ultimately ended its armed struggle in July 2005 and further agreements brought about a final end to the Troubles, negotiated out by the parties involved with Canadian and American diplomats acting successfully as mediators. The Good Friday Agreement and later agreements saw Desharnais and Mitchell share the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize, and indeed the final end of the Troubles coincided with a sizable uptick in Northern Ireland's economy, and as in so many places, prosperity was a help in reducing sectarian tensions. The St. Andrews agreement that restored the Storomont Parliament in 2007 was also negotiated out by Desharnais and Mitchell, and the two men would become forever linked to the Northern Ireland Peace Process - and indeed, one of Desharnais' recommendations outside of the agreement, that being the demolition of the infamous Long Kesh prison and its replacement with a place of enjoyment for all, was made a reality thanks to Canadian money in the form of the massive, 52,000-seat outdoor football stadium, a 15,500-seat indoor arena, equestrian facility, museum showcasing the past history of The Troubles (to be administered by somebody not in any way, shape or form involved, in the interest of retaining impartiality over the conflict) and a variety of commercial and residential uses. The arena was even named the Long Kesh Arena while the rest of the area was named the Belfast Grounds. The football stadium's completion in 2007 was marked by a very special match between the MLS Champions (in the first game, respresented by the Los Angeles Galaxy) facing against the FA Cup Winner Chelsea in the first match in the new stadium, and Long Kesh Arena was opened by a hockey game - in this case the British hockey champions, the Nottingham Panthers, facing the NHL's famed Montreal Canadiens in August 2008.
Canada's own ambitions in the world were matched by desires at home. The completion of the St. Lawrence Valley High-Speed Rail System in Southern Ontario and Southern Quebec would be matched by the United States in the early 2000s, and would be promptly followed by the Wildrose Express as a high-speed system - originally opened as fast-diesel train system for the Calgary Olympics in 1987, its success convinced the government of Alberta to build a high-speed rail system of its own, which opened across its entire Lethbridge-Calgary-Red Deer-Edmonton length in April 2002. Highway 101, the Trans-Canada Expressway that had opened in 1986 was by the 2000s part of a unified system, where Expressways in Canada outside of the 101 were given 400-Series numbers, a decision made on account of the first of other such expressways being Ontario's Highway 400 and 401, both of which dated to the 1940s, improving traffic congestion in several cities. However, owing to the density of several cities, many of the highways followed the examples set by Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver in burying the highways underground where possible. CN came to a formal agreement with Via Rail in 1991 to give Via's passenger trains priority over all but the most important CN freights, a decision Via Rail used to dramatically expand its long-haul services beyond the famed Canadian and Super Continental trains to include the truly-transcontinental Pacifica and Atlantica in 1994 and adding two new Toronto and Montreal to Vancouver / Seattle trains, the Cavalier and Challenger, in 1996, followed by the Toronto-Fort Lauderdale Snowbird in 1997, the latter train being an auto train where passengers and their cars rode on the same train. Following the lead of the hydroelectric dams of Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, Manitoba and Newfoundland, SaskPower began the building of hydroelectric dams in northern Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories in 1988, the first of these going into operation in 2000, further reducing the already steadily-dropping use of fossil fuel-provided power in Canada. As the advent of the internet and computer-operated processing systems allowed ever-better ways of making clothing and designs, several companies, mostly based in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, began to produce custom-made garments at cheaper prices than before, and the internet's growth allowed ever-greater production of such goods in the 2000s, in many ways making Canada (and indeed the United States, Britain and Australia, all of whom were regular buyers of such clothing) to be a place where custom-made clothes were not only within the reach of most citizens, but also desired by many of them, and it turned neighborhoods like LaSalle in Montreal, Liberty Village, Mimico, South Etobicoke and Studio City in Toronto and Mount Pleasant in Vancouver into hotbeds full of designers. This, of course, wasn't minded by the locals to any real degree.
While the number of Canadians of visible minorities had been growing for decades and their influence was long felt, it was in the 1990s where the styles of beyond Canada began to be seen not just among those minorities but also among many other Canadians. While multilingualism was by this point very common in Canada, the common cultures were soon joined by other cultural aspects, starting first at food and sport and advancing rapidly to clothing, style, language and design. Canada's increasing success at association football, rugby and basketball in the latter portions of the 20th Century, long-standing events like the Caribana festivals in Toronto and Montreal, Seattle's Emerald City Festival, the all-night Luminato and Nuit Blanche events in Toronto and Ottawa's famous Winterlude began to be joined by smaller (though in most cases still sizable) events hosted by the ethnic communities meant to introduce outsiders to many of the elements of these peoples' lives. Toronto's Indian community scored a coup (and changed many aspects of Toronto culture for a long time to come) when they petitioned for, and got, a dedicated Indian-Canadian section for the 1992 Canadian National Exhibition which proved a massive hit with locals. Hip-hop music, born in the United States and parts of the Caribbean in the early 1980s, began to have a certain sound of it growing out of the scenes in Toronto and Montreal in the 1990s, while the massive growth of electronic music in North America found a major catalyst point in World Electronic Music Festivals in Vancouver and Seattle in the 1990s. The massive Toronto International Film Festival introduced its first section dedicated to global cinema (defined as not made in North America) in 2001 and immediately scored with its first global cinema prize winner with Hayao Miyazaki's epic Spirited Away, followed repeatedly by incredible movies, with City of God (2002, Brazil), The Lives of Others (2006, Germany), Fashion (2008, India), Born in Jerusalem (2009, Israel) and The Challenge of Redemption (2011, South Africa) being among the winners, and indeed just as with North American TIFF debuts, a Global Cinema Prize win in Toronto usually set up a movie for Golden Globes or Academy Awards success. Asian and Indian clothing styles (particularly in women's clothing) were seen as quite fashionable by the early 2000s, even as Toronto's increasingly-famous Davenport Road area became a North American Savile Row for men's clothing and Canadian stylists - Stephen Roltvoort, Alexandre Richard, Benjamin Kusanat, Kerry Ryan and Taylor Kenda, among others - made the area (and indeed much of the fashionable-and-expensive Yorkville district) quite a hotbed of modern fashion. Canadian fashion designs tended to be ones that dealt with both the country's cold northern climate and its quite-warm Caribbean regions.
The sands may have been shifting as far as mainstream culture, but for symbols, very little changed. Despite the distance between Canada and Britain, the connections to the British crown remained, even as a desire by Prince of Wales to serve as Canada's Governor-General in the 1980s was politely declined by Ottawa, who was used to having Canadians in such a position - and indeed while the Governor-General of Canada and the Lieutentant Generals of the provinces were long a position more ceremonial than anything else, pretty much every person who held such a position tended to have personal goals or causes to which they wished to raise interest using the position, and starting with Ray Hnatyshyn (1990-1995) were more populist in tone and sought ever-greater accessibility to Canadians. The newly-elected government of Ontario Premier Mike Harris made headlines in the winter of 1995 when, just before Toronto's hosting of the Olympics, he sought to have the Royal honorific attached to the Ontario Provincial Police, causing more than a little bit of controversy in the process but ultimately getting his way, and with the approval of a sizable majority of the police force themselves, particularly as the RCMP and several provincial forces (including Newfoundland, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago) had the honorific themselves, and the Royal Ontario Provincial Police began using the term for the first time in June 1996. The Canadian armed forces, likewise, were well-regarded by the vast majority of the country's population and regularly sought to keep it that way, both through their own actions and public relations images - the Canadian Army were regulars at major events and showed off their gear at most major festivals, and their own recruitment campaigns were focused on the idea of Canadian soldiers, sailors and airmen being defenders of life, freedom and peace, a campaign that Operation Messiah made abundantly clear. The military had its own issues with the conduct of its members in multiple sexual assault allegations in the 1990s, though, and individual soldiers' conduct towards the LGBT community at times left a lot to be desired. Those flaws regardless, the Canadian armed forces' reputation, quality of service life, considerable perks and quite-lavish pay scale (even new privates, aircraftmen or sailors made at least $28,000 a year, and higher-ranking field officers could make better than $160,000 a year) made sure the forces had little of the difficulties encountered by some other armed forces in retaining key personnel.
The creation of Nunavut out of the Northwest Territories in 1999 added an additional aspect to the position of Native Canadians within Canada, as Nunavut was the first territory specifically created for the inhabitants of Canada's northern regions. Nunavut was also a proved challenge to be able to provide services to, namely due to the remote locations and vast distances involved - Nunavut, with a population of just over 40,000, has a land area larger than Western Europe - and dealing with lingering problems with social issues. Regardless, one of the projects built for the region was the construction of roads to link Churchill, Manitoba, with the Nunavut communities of Arviat, Baker Lake, Rankin Inlet, Repulse Bay and Igoolik, the road completed to Igoolik in 1995. Two years later, however, prospectors discovered a massive iron ore deposit on the Melville Peninsula some 65 kilometres southwest of Igloolik. Subsequent discoveries found truly massive iron ore deposits in the northern reaches of Nunavut and the Melville and Boothia Peninsulas, of sufficient size than when plans for mines were approved in 2001, Canadian National Railways quickly lobbied the Nunavut government to allow it to build a railway line from its northern portions to the mines, stating that this would be a more appropriate way of serving several immense mines. CN's willingness to make such an investment convinced the territory, and the railroad shipped its first iron ore from the Melville Mine in June 2005. The huge royalty payments made to the territory's own Nunavut Natural Resource Fund allowed the province in less than a decade to begin making huge investments into the provinces' own economic prospects, focusing primarily on mining, tourism, environmental stewardship and traditional Inuit income sources, as well as rapidly cut down on the territory's social ills.
Just as with all the world, Canada was stunned stupid by the events of September 11, 2001, when terrorists struck at the United States, first committing suicide bombings on a pair of Acela Express high-speed trains just after 8:00 am near Cornwells Heights, Pennsylvania and Greenwich, Connecticut, derailing both trains at better than 110 miles per hour and causing in both cases collisions at huge speed with SEPTA and Shore Line East commuter trains, killing 252 people and injuring over 500, along with a suicide bomber inside of Boston's South Station, that attack at 8:18 am killing 19 and injuring 230. A second suicide bomber killed himself at Washington Union Station at 9:11 am, killing 22 and injuring 181. This was followed by the four hijacked aircraft, the first of which struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 am. The second aircraft crashed into the South Tower at 9:03 am. The third hijacked aircraft slammed into the Pentagon at 9:37 am, while the fourth, United Flight 93, saw the passengers attempt to take the plane back from hijackers, and as a result the airliner was deliberately flown into the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, hitting the power plant at 10:24 am. Both of the World Trade Center towers collapsed, the South Tower at 9:59 am and the North Tower at 10:28 am. Three Mile Island's two nuclear reactors weren't damaged, but the facility itself was seriously damaged as a result and the power plant was knocked off the power grid for 36 months as a result. The Pentagon took substantial damage, but this was ultimately repaired. The 9/11 attacks were easily the worst terrorist attack in modern times and the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. 3,922 people died (3,148 in the World Trade Center, 252 on the Acela trains, 265 on the hijacked aircraft, 127 at the Pentagon, 41 by the suicide bombers and 66 employees at Three Mile Island, as well as 23 terrorists) and over 8,000 were injured. Over 400 members of the New York Police Department and New York Fire Department lost their lives when the towers collapsed, and with the severe damage in New York as well as two busy train stations and the Northeast Corridor, movement in the Northeast Corridor of the United States was paralyzed for the time being. The United States immediately grounded all aircraft in the air at that point, effectively closing their airspace and forcing over six hundred aircraft to either turn back or land in Canada or Mexico.
The first days after the event were a sign of what was to come. Over 300 flights to the United States had no choice but to land in Canada, landing everywhere from the vast airports in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver to other airports across Canada. The tiny town of Gander, Newfoundland, took in 38 flights, landing 6,600 passengers in a town with a population of just 10,000. The sudden and totally-unexpected arrival of 317 flights to the United States, carrying some 67,000 passengers, proved a massive and difficult task, but one which was handled by airports involved with incredible results. Gander in particular became a symbol of just what could be done, as the hospitality of the tiny Newfoundland town created memories that for those involved lasted a lifetime. Everyone in Canada who could pitch in, seemingly, did - thousands of the visitors stayed with private citizens who opened up homes, restaurants worked overtime to feed visitors, shops provided what they could. Even in the big cities of Vancouver and Halifax, hotel rooms were opened for arrivals and private citizens did everything possible. More than a few of the sudden visitors to Canada rather liked what they found, and not just in the small towns but also in the big cities, and the Canadian Government would end up creating a complete exhibit on Operation Yellow Ribbon as a result of the work of photojournalists.
Once the border was opened again later in the evening on September 11, Via Rail's high-speed trains raced out of Toronto and Montreal to New York, Detroit, Boston and Chicago to help get people home from the United States, and then to assist Amtrak's efforts to handle a suddenly-huge demand for its services, while Via Rail's extra train sets for the Canadian, Super Continental and Atlantica were went to Portland and San Francisco for the same reason. Once Amtrak had the Northeast Corridor back going and stations back open (a process that, thanks to fast-moving volunteers and freight company track repair crews as well as Amtrak's own people, took less than 48 hours), train travel in the United States went mad. Toronto's GO Transit and Montreal's AMT sent commuter trains to Buffalo, Detroit and Boston to allow Amtrak equipment to move to other duties, and CN supplied motive power of their own to other users. American railroads did the same, and in several incredible cases steam locomotives meant for excursion services were dispatched to help Amtrak with the load. Amtrak sent out every bit of equipment they had and anything they could get their hands on to handle the sudden load. People, to the surprise of few, tolerated Amtrak's inability to handle the load well, knowing of the company doing everything its power to move people and goods. Between the huge efforts and the Canadian and American high-speed lines being worth their weight in gold in the days after the attacks, in October 2001, when the United States Congress bailed out their airlines, they dropped a monster appropriation for Amtrak - both for over five billion dollars worth of new equipment for its intercity routes and for a planned high-speed system for the Midwestern United States, as well as expansions of existing Northeast Corridor, Keystone Corridor, Texas, Florida and California high-speed systems. From 2002 until the 2020s, the world's rail engineers found themselves focused heavily on the United States, as Amtrak built better than 8,500 miles of high-speed rail lines. Canada and the United States co-operated on the newest West Coast system for these lines, building the Northwest High-Speed System in the 2000s and 2010s, running from Whistler, British Columbia, through Vancouver, Richmond, Bellingham, Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia, crossing into the United States at Portland and then serving Salem and Eugene, Oregon.
Perhaps more amazing than the 9/11 attacks themselves and the immediate response was what happened after. The international response was one of aghast horror and loud support for whatever the United States chose to do to bring justice for its immense losses. Perhaps most stunned was the Middle Eastern countries - the President of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, spoke for most when he called 9/11 "A crime with few comparisons in human history" and that "no matter our quarrels, nothing justifies this. Nothing, and we all know it is nothing because we need only look at the people we love, and know that nearly four thousand people now can not do that, and we can all imagine what we would feel like if that had been one of us". Particularly geopolitically changing, however, was revelations by the FBI in the weeks after the attack that twenty of the twenty-three terrorists involved in the attack were from Saudi Arabia. While the government of Saudi Arabia loudly claimed that they had nothing to do with the attacks (and no proof of otherwise has ever been found), it did cause a massive rift in the Middle East. While the governmental links never broke, Americans wouldn't soon forgive the Saudis, and the move ultimately resulted in a quite-decisive long-term shift in the diplomatic power in the region away from the House of Saud towards, particularly, their arch-rivals in Tehran. Later on, this would cause a sizable divide between the Saudis and their Arab brothers. In the United States, a number of initial hate crimes against Muslims hardly lasted a week (and nearly all of those responsible for those would end up facing legal repercussions for their actions), but the shift in every other way towards them was notable almost immediately. The Muslim community in the United States had never suffered from a lack of patriotism towards their country, and they if anything were the angriest towards the terrorists themselves. Muslim societies and mosques raised over $20 million for 9/11 victims, and numerous cases of Muslims in the media, from famed architect Zaha Hadid to boxing icon Muhammad Ali, angrily calling out Muslim terrorists was across the media everywhere.
The discovery of Al-Qaeda's being the planners and executors of the 9/11 attacks caused massive rage all around the world, and the discovery of the involvement of the Taliban in Afghanistan in sheltering Al-Qaeda terrorists proved a line much too far for the West, as a massive coalition of the West's armed forces gathered to go after those responsible. Despite this, great care was taken to make sure the operation included Muslim countries and armed forces, and that didn't prove hard to accomplish. Beyond that, Washington was only too keen to make 9/11 a catalyst for greater understanding between the West and the Muslim world, and they went to considerable lengths to advance this, including inviting the world's Muslim leaders to visit Ground Zero and speak about what they felt was the differences in the world, while at the same time working on what indeed was the root cause of the supporters of terror. It would become clear in the 2000s what was going on in the world, and even as the first attack forces of the War in Afghanistan landed there in October 2001, the world was understanding what was going on in the Muslim world, and it didn't make things easier for anyone.
In the years since the Ottawa Treaty, the independence of Palestine and the normalization of relations between Israel and its neighbors in Jordan and Egypt as well as Iran and Morocco (followed by Tunisia in 1984 and Lebanon in 1986), the portions of the Middle East that were shifting in favor of more open societies - which an averted revolution had forced in Iran and a civil war had forced in Lebanon, along with desires for social advancement in Palestine, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco - had rapidly seen social norms change as well as political ones, as greater freedom of speech and thought and growing prosperity brought about a steady repudiation of Islamism as an ideology as its holes could be seen quite clearly. By 2001, the Assad brothers in Syria and Moammar Gaddafi in Libya were also joining the party, both out of desire to avoid potential revolutions themselves and grow their countries' economic potential. In Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Iraq, Sudan and Pakistan, however, decades of strict authoritarian rule and harder-line interpretations of Islam hade brought about highly calcified societies, and the inability to find outlets for disagreements over policy had led to growth in the appeal of Islamism in these countries, which when combined with authoritarian rule had invariably pushed some into the hands of those who would use violent ends to achieve their goals, and for the leaders of Al-Qaeda, the presence of western troops in the Holy Land and the normalization of relations with Israel by other Arab states was reason enough for them to attack the West.
Even as the War in Afghanistan began, the world was already leaning on the more calcified Muslim societies to act as a catalyst for change, though progress here was limited in the larger states (Pakistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia) and slower in the smaller ones, even as Iran's efforts to make itself the center of the "Advanced Muslim World" in the eyes of the West - efforts that dated to the White Revolution - continued to bear fruit and make life difficult for the Arabs of the Saudi Kingdom and the Gulf States and India's push to become the nation of the future made life increasingly difficult for Pakistan.
For Canada, what became known as Operation Apollo began on October 15, 2001, as the Canadian Special Air Service and 427 Squadron RCAF was deployed, alongside American, British, Australian and Palestinian special forces units, to assist the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. Supported by American, Canadian, British and Iranian airstrikes and huge defections, the Taliban collapsed across much of the northern portion of the country - and that was before Task Force 57 arrived.
Task Force 57 was the name for the vast fleet that the Commonwealth and the French had agreed to send to support the Americans. Commanded by RCN Admiral Stephen McMillan, the fleet was centered on HMCS Canada, HMS Queen Elizabeth II, HMAS Australia and FS Charles de Gaulle, and included over 60 vessels of all four nations and other contributions from the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa and Singapore. The vast naval force came into being when Canada and Queen Elizabeth II met up with the Charles de Gaulle in the Mediterranean on November 16, 2001, and began operations off of Iran on November 29, attacking Taliban targets in Kandahar province. Ably supported by Iranian tankers, the Task Force launched such a number of operations that the American carriers United States and John F. Kennedy were able to retire for a four week period to Darwin, Australia, allowing the Canadian, British, Australian and French aircraft to handle business. They did an incredibly good job of it, too - indeed, when French reconnaissance satellites reported suspicious activities near Gardez on December 19, 2001, Canadian SAS troopers confirmed the reports the next day, and then on Christmas Eve two Australian RF-111C recon aircraft confirmed the presence of Taliban units in the area, leading to Operation Anaconda, where American ground units joined the Commonwealth units in fighting in the region, a battle that was successful in routing the Taliban out of the area. But a bigger prize was to await six weeks later east of Gardez.
Having routed the Taliban in much of eastern Afghanistan, on January 26, 2002 the Western forces assaulted the Tora Bora cave complex near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. American, British, Canadian and Australian special forces as well as Iranian mountain troops and a company of Palestinian airmobile troops, supported by American, Dutch and British attack helicopters, British fighter-bombers and Canadian and Australian strike aircraft, conducted a massive raid on the Tora Bora complex. Al-Qaeda's operatives fought bitterly to the end, but they were unable to hang on, and the operation captured Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Saif al-Adel and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, while Mohammed Atef and Asim Abdulrahman were both killed in the operations. The operation effectively took the head off of Al-Qaeda for the moment, but it was a vast success, and what followed it was more so.
Despite calls for him to them to be tried in America, both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri were tried by a special prosecutional court set up in Jerusalem, following Islamic law principles and chaired by three judges, the chief judge being the Muslim cleric who was the one who also was responsible for Jerusalem who had also selected the other two. Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri were allowed to choose their own legal counsel and make their own cases. The trial, which lasted ten days, was broadcasted live all around the world and gave much of the world their first knowledge of what a trial by Islamic law looked like, and the approval of it in courts around the world was considerable, approval that grew when both were judged guilty, and both were sentenced to life imprisonment in the nation that had suffered the most grave wounds from their actions - that obviously being the United States. Both Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri were then sent to the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado in the United States, where both would live out the rest of their lives. Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri both would later seek judgements in American courts that the trial had been unfair, but the United States Supreme Court denied to hear the case in 2010, and Bin Laden died of kidney failure while still a prisoner at ADX Florence in May 2014.
Operational Apollo's first acts, namely that of kicking over the Taliban, also broadcast to the world where Iran stood on the issues of the day. Tehran, who was heartily sick and tired of the Taliban and fully aware of the ability to use the changes in the world to increase its stature in the world, was only too happy to allow ships to offload in Iran and make their way from the ports of Chahbehar and Bandar Abbas across Iran to Afghanistan, with the Iranians even upgrading highways and railways to allow easier support of NATO units in Afghanistan, and Iranian units were involved in the operations from the moment they began. Iran's armed forces quickly proved a surprise to the West - their heavy armored units were reasonable, but their mountain troops and special forces units were remarkably good, a situation mirrored with other Arabs, the Palestinians most of all - though as the Palestinians, well aware of Israeli security concerns and the huge forces disparity between them, had always trained their armed forces to a very fine edge.
Iran's massive wealth growth and its steady improvements in the freedoms and rights of its society in the 1980s and 1990s - demanded as a result of the averted revolutions and followed by the new politicians as a result - was rapidly turning Iran into a much more progressive nation than most of its Middle Eastern brothers, and knowing that this was a key to the growth in the country's wealth and power during the same period, openly encouraged this. The desire of the Iranians to turn their country as the junction of East and West also factored into it, and while the grandiose plans of the Imperial Era were backed off considerably in the 1980s, some vast plans remained, and by the 1990s many of these returned, in many places driven by the House of Pahlavi themselves - even as their unquestioned power over Iran had been ended by the political changes of the 1980s, Shah Reza Pahlavi II was one of Iran's most famous people and he wielded massive influence within Iran, and the Pahlavis channeled their vast wealth in the 1980s and 1990s into a vast series of ventures, programs and ideas meant to improve Iran's position in the world.
The creation of Pahlavi's Persian Crown Award in 1985 (done to allow him to use his immense wealth and knowledge in Iran to advance Iranians who had done good deeds for their country or all of humanity) became a sign of what the House of Pahlavi saw themselves as in modern Iran, and the rest of the House of Pahlavi proved genuinely dedicated to advancing Iran, including a highly-visible role in the by Prince Ali Reza Pahlavi, the younger brother of the Shah and a Lieutenant Colonel of Iran's 24th Mountain Infantry Division, in the Assault on Tora Bora. Perhaps even more stunning to Iran was the first meeting between the Shah's second wife, Queen Soraya, and his widow, Empress Farah, in Los Angeles in 1992, a meeting which rapidly resulted in Soraya's return to the Royal Family - despite not technically being part of the Royal bloodline, Soraya was accepted by the Pahlavis as one of the family, a sign that past actions were able to be forgiven in the modern Pahlavi dynasty, and that Soraya, whose marriage had been ended as a result of her infertility and the demands placed upon her to bear a male heir, was a worthy member of Iran's elite. Perhaps more shocking events came in November 2000, when the retirement of Prime Minister Mohammed Khatami resulted in the election of former Tehran judge and influential minister Shirin Ebadi as the Prime Minister of Iran. Initial shock at Ebadi's election among some sections of Iran's elite dissipated quickly, though, as Ebadi deftly handled the 2000s for Iran, retiring from her position after fourteen years in power in 2014 and being one of the world's most powerful female politicians during the time.
Iran's wealth and desires to the junction of East and West put them massively at odds with their Arab brothers, but while this hadn't been an issue with the Cold War as a context, after the 9/11 attacks the calculus changed. Huge resource wealth was making sure relations didn't go completely south on all sides, but the many flaws of the societies of the harder-line Arab states were soon blown right out into the open, despite the best attempts of the nations involved (particularly the Saudis) to fight back the perceptions. Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates found the world's hostiliy towards Islamic fundamentalism in the 2000s a sign that they needed to move away from the highly calcified societies, a process sure to be painful but one which was made necessary by the world's changes, while Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan in particular fought the changes in the world.
While the massive initial invasions by the West had substantial success in flushing out the Taliban, they quickly retreated into a masive guerilla campaign - but would soon quickly find out that the Malayan Emergency and Vietnam War had taught more than a few lessons to the West, and after the initial destruction of the Taliban government was completed in the summer of 2003, the developments of the Northern Alliance - which had initially all banded together to fight the Taliban - found themselves having to work out their differences for a peaceful, more ethnically balanced Afghanistan. These elements, when combined with major development projects funded by the West, caused public support for the Taliban to sink dramatically. By spring 2004, however, it was clear that the Taliban were being supplied from Pakistan and were drawing large number of recruits from there. Operation Challenger was the result, launched on April 25, 2004, to seal off the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Led by Canadian Army with British, French and Iranian units, the operation was largely divided between British heavy units controlling the south ends of Kandahar, Helmand and Nimruz provinces, Iranian mountain troops and Canadian infantry drawing the job of stopping infiltrations across Paktia, Paktika, Chost, Nargahar and Logar provinces and French units undertaking similar operations in Konar and Nuristan provinces as well as securing the Khyber Pass. This was done while American, German and Australian units went right after the Taliban's home turf in northern Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul provinces, in every case helped by a great many Afghans themselves.
The operation proved a long process, but through 2004 and 2005 was clearly succeeding, even as Pakistani attempts at stopping infiltration were effectively useless and ended up doing little more than stirring chaos in Pakistan's nearly-lawless tribal border regions. The Iranians had pioneered the idea of the use of lightweight all-terrain vehicles, motorcycles and buggies was rapidly copied by the other nations involved for their usefulness, usually with the best possible engine noise reduction, the Canadian Army's use of a very large number of helicopters also helped immensely, and everyone involved began using both larger UAVs for surveillance and smaller ones used at company or even in some cases platoon level - all necessary to reduce the number of infiltrations into Afghanistan. Pakistan was soon also under heavy pressure to stop the infiltrations. The taking on of the Taliban insurgency, however, proved a mostly successful operation in their mountainous heartlands, and by late 2005 the Taliban were losing even their strongholds, retreating into Pakistan, causing a whole new set of problems for both the Pakistanis and NATO.
By the time 2000 reached the world, there was a number of things becoming obvious to the world - the immense financial and economic clout of the West was being challenged by newcomers to the world, and that the centers of the modern West - America, Europe and the Commonwealth - weren't objecting to this, in many cases because facilitating it was making these countries wealthy and their elites in many cases incredibly rich. The tech world's 1990s and 2000s boom, despite its spectacular 2000-2001 bust, had resulted in hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables laid in North America, Europe, Japan, Korea and Australia, and the growth of internet traffic that was to come in the following two decades simply wouldn't have been possible without that infrastructure, and the growth of mobile communications that began in the West in the second half of the 1990s rapidly blew across the developed world and then with even greater speed blew across the less-developed portions of the world in the 2000s. Such communications would bring about vast social changes in nations all across the globe, and economics would supercharge many of the effects.
For the Commonwealth of Nations, the new millenium dawn with them having out of both desire and necessity seek to advance the interests of its less-wealthy members, but this was not proving to be hard in the slightest. Made ludicrously rich by both immense natural resource wealth, proper management of it and not a small amount of economic nationalism, Canada was every bit an equal to the United Kingdom in global affairs, and Australia, who had been full-stop copying many of Canada's social and economic tactics for decades, was standing up right next to their Commonwealth brothers, and the Commonwealth wasn't hurt by the fact that its two largest pet projects - India and South Africa - were both in the midst of vast economic booms that were in the former's case advancing a country that viewed itself as a potential superpower and in the latter case building a whole new world in a nation that had a dark past. Having joined the Commonwealth in 1989, Israel had rapidly established itself as a Central Commonwealth member to such a degree that the Israelis by the millenium viewed London, Ottawa and Canberra as being every bit as important a connection as Washington. Both Ottawa and London also had considerable influence upon the European Union, born of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty out of a desire to ensure a lasting peace through social interchange, economic prosperity and global influence for the nations of Europe who had been sparring with each other on a regular basis for centuries. Having been on a spectacular upward trajectory in the 1980s only to have Tiananmen Square and the collapse first of the Japanese asset bubble and then Korea's famed (or infamous depending on the perspective) chaebols cause them to have a troubled 1990s, Asia in 2000 had taken stock of its situation, and Japan in particular saw its future prosperity being ensured by beating out the affluent West in their own fields, primarily electronics, automobiles, aerospace technologies and shipbuilding, though they would not find this going easy. China, who by the end of the 1990s was seeing that Tiananmen Square and the Hong Kong Crisis had become spectacular screwups even in their judgement, would spend the 2000s rebuilding its relations with the West, though by then it would be clear that the vast economic growth through industrialization that could have been theirs was an opportunity lost forever, lost most of all to India but also to Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran and southern and eastern Africa.
For Canada, by 2000 the wealthiest nation per capita among larger nations on Earth (with a GDP/capita of some $53,770), the decades-long project of improving its territories in the Caribbean mostly complete, the desires for multiculturalism and multilingualism (though with plenty of common symbols, interests, images and desires being part of the equation, of course) paying vast dividends, Native Canadians being part of Canadian society on practically every level and Canadians of other races being every bit the equal of whites, the country was ready to slug way above its weight in social terms as well as economic ones, and they wanted it in every way possible. The legalization of same-sex marriage and all of the benefits afforded to married couples in 1997 was a landmark ruling for the LGBT community even in a country where public bigotry tended to be highly unhelpful to one's position in society. Canada by the late 1990s was aiming to advance its own society in terms of social cohesion and wealth, and its foreign policy was aimed primarily at advancing human rights and democracy even in areas where the two didn't tend to mix with local customs or governments all that well, particualrly in Africa. Despite that, the once-deeply conservative elements of Canadian society were by the millenium much changed themselves, and even in the prairie provinces, whose societal changes had been far slower than Ontario, Quebec, the coastal regions or the islands, was shifting dramatically, in large part owing to the fact that Native Canadians tended to be considerably more socially liberal than their predominantly-white neighbors and they were a very sizable portion of the population in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Northern Ontario.
Of particular success to Canada in the dying days of the 20th Century had been its influence in the final peace deals in Northern Ireland, along with the United States. Veteran Canadian diplomat Jean-Michel Desharnais and his American counterpart, George Mitchell, would ultimately be instrumental in developing many elements of the Northern Ireland peace process, including helping to draft the Mitchell Principles in January 1996, and with Desharnais and Mitchell being the chairmen of the talks that ultimately culminated in the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, agreed to on April 10, 1998. While the initial process of sorting out the agreements was at times rocky, the IRA ultimately ended its armed struggle in July 2005 and further agreements brought about a final end to the Troubles, negotiated out by the parties involved with Canadian and American diplomats acting successfully as mediators. The Good Friday Agreement and later agreements saw Desharnais and Mitchell share the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize, and indeed the final end of the Troubles coincided with a sizable uptick in Northern Ireland's economy, and as in so many places, prosperity was a help in reducing sectarian tensions. The St. Andrews agreement that restored the Storomont Parliament in 2007 was also negotiated out by Desharnais and Mitchell, and the two men would become forever linked to the Northern Ireland Peace Process - and indeed, one of Desharnais' recommendations outside of the agreement, that being the demolition of the infamous Long Kesh prison and its replacement with a place of enjoyment for all, was made a reality thanks to Canadian money in the form of the massive, 52,000-seat outdoor football stadium, a 15,500-seat indoor arena, equestrian facility, museum showcasing the past history of The Troubles (to be administered by somebody not in any way, shape or form involved, in the interest of retaining impartiality over the conflict) and a variety of commercial and residential uses. The arena was even named the Long Kesh Arena while the rest of the area was named the Belfast Grounds. The football stadium's completion in 2007 was marked by a very special match between the MLS Champions (in the first game, respresented by the Los Angeles Galaxy) facing against the FA Cup Winner Chelsea in the first match in the new stadium, and Long Kesh Arena was opened by a hockey game - in this case the British hockey champions, the Nottingham Panthers, facing the NHL's famed Montreal Canadiens in August 2008.
Canada's own ambitions in the world were matched by desires at home. The completion of the St. Lawrence Valley High-Speed Rail System in Southern Ontario and Southern Quebec would be matched by the United States in the early 2000s, and would be promptly followed by the Wildrose Express as a high-speed system - originally opened as fast-diesel train system for the Calgary Olympics in 1987, its success convinced the government of Alberta to build a high-speed rail system of its own, which opened across its entire Lethbridge-Calgary-Red Deer-Edmonton length in April 2002. Highway 101, the Trans-Canada Expressway that had opened in 1986 was by the 2000s part of a unified system, where Expressways in Canada outside of the 101 were given 400-Series numbers, a decision made on account of the first of other such expressways being Ontario's Highway 400 and 401, both of which dated to the 1940s, improving traffic congestion in several cities. However, owing to the density of several cities, many of the highways followed the examples set by Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver in burying the highways underground where possible. CN came to a formal agreement with Via Rail in 1991 to give Via's passenger trains priority over all but the most important CN freights, a decision Via Rail used to dramatically expand its long-haul services beyond the famed Canadian and Super Continental trains to include the truly-transcontinental Pacifica and Atlantica in 1994 and adding two new Toronto and Montreal to Vancouver / Seattle trains, the Cavalier and Challenger, in 1996, followed by the Toronto-Fort Lauderdale Snowbird in 1997, the latter train being an auto train where passengers and their cars rode on the same train. Following the lead of the hydroelectric dams of Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, Manitoba and Newfoundland, SaskPower began the building of hydroelectric dams in northern Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories in 1988, the first of these going into operation in 2000, further reducing the already steadily-dropping use of fossil fuel-provided power in Canada. As the advent of the internet and computer-operated processing systems allowed ever-better ways of making clothing and designs, several companies, mostly based in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, began to produce custom-made garments at cheaper prices than before, and the internet's growth allowed ever-greater production of such goods in the 2000s, in many ways making Canada (and indeed the United States, Britain and Australia, all of whom were regular buyers of such clothing) to be a place where custom-made clothes were not only within the reach of most citizens, but also desired by many of them, and it turned neighborhoods like LaSalle in Montreal, Liberty Village, Mimico, South Etobicoke and Studio City in Toronto and Mount Pleasant in Vancouver into hotbeds full of designers. This, of course, wasn't minded by the locals to any real degree.
While the number of Canadians of visible minorities had been growing for decades and their influence was long felt, it was in the 1990s where the styles of beyond Canada began to be seen not just among those minorities but also among many other Canadians. While multilingualism was by this point very common in Canada, the common cultures were soon joined by other cultural aspects, starting first at food and sport and advancing rapidly to clothing, style, language and design. Canada's increasing success at association football, rugby and basketball in the latter portions of the 20th Century, long-standing events like the Caribana festivals in Toronto and Montreal, Seattle's Emerald City Festival, the all-night Luminato and Nuit Blanche events in Toronto and Ottawa's famous Winterlude began to be joined by smaller (though in most cases still sizable) events hosted by the ethnic communities meant to introduce outsiders to many of the elements of these peoples' lives. Toronto's Indian community scored a coup (and changed many aspects of Toronto culture for a long time to come) when they petitioned for, and got, a dedicated Indian-Canadian section for the 1992 Canadian National Exhibition which proved a massive hit with locals. Hip-hop music, born in the United States and parts of the Caribbean in the early 1980s, began to have a certain sound of it growing out of the scenes in Toronto and Montreal in the 1990s, while the massive growth of electronic music in North America found a major catalyst point in World Electronic Music Festivals in Vancouver and Seattle in the 1990s. The massive Toronto International Film Festival introduced its first section dedicated to global cinema (defined as not made in North America) in 2001 and immediately scored with its first global cinema prize winner with Hayao Miyazaki's epic Spirited Away, followed repeatedly by incredible movies, with City of God (2002, Brazil), The Lives of Others (2006, Germany), Fashion (2008, India), Born in Jerusalem (2009, Israel) and The Challenge of Redemption (2011, South Africa) being among the winners, and indeed just as with North American TIFF debuts, a Global Cinema Prize win in Toronto usually set up a movie for Golden Globes or Academy Awards success. Asian and Indian clothing styles (particularly in women's clothing) were seen as quite fashionable by the early 2000s, even as Toronto's increasingly-famous Davenport Road area became a North American Savile Row for men's clothing and Canadian stylists - Stephen Roltvoort, Alexandre Richard, Benjamin Kusanat, Kerry Ryan and Taylor Kenda, among others - made the area (and indeed much of the fashionable-and-expensive Yorkville district) quite a hotbed of modern fashion. Canadian fashion designs tended to be ones that dealt with both the country's cold northern climate and its quite-warm Caribbean regions.
The sands may have been shifting as far as mainstream culture, but for symbols, very little changed. Despite the distance between Canada and Britain, the connections to the British crown remained, even as a desire by Prince of Wales to serve as Canada's Governor-General in the 1980s was politely declined by Ottawa, who was used to having Canadians in such a position - and indeed while the Governor-General of Canada and the Lieutentant Generals of the provinces were long a position more ceremonial than anything else, pretty much every person who held such a position tended to have personal goals or causes to which they wished to raise interest using the position, and starting with Ray Hnatyshyn (1990-1995) were more populist in tone and sought ever-greater accessibility to Canadians. The newly-elected government of Ontario Premier Mike Harris made headlines in the winter of 1995 when, just before Toronto's hosting of the Olympics, he sought to have the Royal honorific attached to the Ontario Provincial Police, causing more than a little bit of controversy in the process but ultimately getting his way, and with the approval of a sizable majority of the police force themselves, particularly as the RCMP and several provincial forces (including Newfoundland, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago) had the honorific themselves, and the Royal Ontario Provincial Police began using the term for the first time in June 1996. The Canadian armed forces, likewise, were well-regarded by the vast majority of the country's population and regularly sought to keep it that way, both through their own actions and public relations images - the Canadian Army were regulars at major events and showed off their gear at most major festivals, and their own recruitment campaigns were focused on the idea of Canadian soldiers, sailors and airmen being defenders of life, freedom and peace, a campaign that Operation Messiah made abundantly clear. The military had its own issues with the conduct of its members in multiple sexual assault allegations in the 1990s, though, and individual soldiers' conduct towards the LGBT community at times left a lot to be desired. Those flaws regardless, the Canadian armed forces' reputation, quality of service life, considerable perks and quite-lavish pay scale (even new privates, aircraftmen or sailors made at least $28,000 a year, and higher-ranking field officers could make better than $160,000 a year) made sure the forces had little of the difficulties encountered by some other armed forces in retaining key personnel.
The creation of Nunavut out of the Northwest Territories in 1999 added an additional aspect to the position of Native Canadians within Canada, as Nunavut was the first territory specifically created for the inhabitants of Canada's northern regions. Nunavut was also a proved challenge to be able to provide services to, namely due to the remote locations and vast distances involved - Nunavut, with a population of just over 40,000, has a land area larger than Western Europe - and dealing with lingering problems with social issues. Regardless, one of the projects built for the region was the construction of roads to link Churchill, Manitoba, with the Nunavut communities of Arviat, Baker Lake, Rankin Inlet, Repulse Bay and Igoolik, the road completed to Igoolik in 1995. Two years later, however, prospectors discovered a massive iron ore deposit on the Melville Peninsula some 65 kilometres southwest of Igloolik. Subsequent discoveries found truly massive iron ore deposits in the northern reaches of Nunavut and the Melville and Boothia Peninsulas, of sufficient size than when plans for mines were approved in 2001, Canadian National Railways quickly lobbied the Nunavut government to allow it to build a railway line from its northern portions to the mines, stating that this would be a more appropriate way of serving several immense mines. CN's willingness to make such an investment convinced the territory, and the railroad shipped its first iron ore from the Melville Mine in June 2005. The huge royalty payments made to the territory's own Nunavut Natural Resource Fund allowed the province in less than a decade to begin making huge investments into the provinces' own economic prospects, focusing primarily on mining, tourism, environmental stewardship and traditional Inuit income sources, as well as rapidly cut down on the territory's social ills.
Just as with all the world, Canada was stunned stupid by the events of September 11, 2001, when terrorists struck at the United States, first committing suicide bombings on a pair of Acela Express high-speed trains just after 8:00 am near Cornwells Heights, Pennsylvania and Greenwich, Connecticut, derailing both trains at better than 110 miles per hour and causing in both cases collisions at huge speed with SEPTA and Shore Line East commuter trains, killing 252 people and injuring over 500, along with a suicide bomber inside of Boston's South Station, that attack at 8:18 am killing 19 and injuring 230. A second suicide bomber killed himself at Washington Union Station at 9:11 am, killing 22 and injuring 181. This was followed by the four hijacked aircraft, the first of which struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 am. The second aircraft crashed into the South Tower at 9:03 am. The third hijacked aircraft slammed into the Pentagon at 9:37 am, while the fourth, United Flight 93, saw the passengers attempt to take the plane back from hijackers, and as a result the airliner was deliberately flown into the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, hitting the power plant at 10:24 am. Both of the World Trade Center towers collapsed, the South Tower at 9:59 am and the North Tower at 10:28 am. Three Mile Island's two nuclear reactors weren't damaged, but the facility itself was seriously damaged as a result and the power plant was knocked off the power grid for 36 months as a result. The Pentagon took substantial damage, but this was ultimately repaired. The 9/11 attacks were easily the worst terrorist attack in modern times and the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. 3,922 people died (3,148 in the World Trade Center, 252 on the Acela trains, 265 on the hijacked aircraft, 127 at the Pentagon, 41 by the suicide bombers and 66 employees at Three Mile Island, as well as 23 terrorists) and over 8,000 were injured. Over 400 members of the New York Police Department and New York Fire Department lost their lives when the towers collapsed, and with the severe damage in New York as well as two busy train stations and the Northeast Corridor, movement in the Northeast Corridor of the United States was paralyzed for the time being. The United States immediately grounded all aircraft in the air at that point, effectively closing their airspace and forcing over six hundred aircraft to either turn back or land in Canada or Mexico.
The first days after the event were a sign of what was to come. Over 300 flights to the United States had no choice but to land in Canada, landing everywhere from the vast airports in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver to other airports across Canada. The tiny town of Gander, Newfoundland, took in 38 flights, landing 6,600 passengers in a town with a population of just 10,000. The sudden and totally-unexpected arrival of 317 flights to the United States, carrying some 67,000 passengers, proved a massive and difficult task, but one which was handled by airports involved with incredible results. Gander in particular became a symbol of just what could be done, as the hospitality of the tiny Newfoundland town created memories that for those involved lasted a lifetime. Everyone in Canada who could pitch in, seemingly, did - thousands of the visitors stayed with private citizens who opened up homes, restaurants worked overtime to feed visitors, shops provided what they could. Even in the big cities of Vancouver and Halifax, hotel rooms were opened for arrivals and private citizens did everything possible. More than a few of the sudden visitors to Canada rather liked what they found, and not just in the small towns but also in the big cities, and the Canadian Government would end up creating a complete exhibit on Operation Yellow Ribbon as a result of the work of photojournalists.
Once the border was opened again later in the evening on September 11, Via Rail's high-speed trains raced out of Toronto and Montreal to New York, Detroit, Boston and Chicago to help get people home from the United States, and then to assist Amtrak's efforts to handle a suddenly-huge demand for its services, while Via Rail's extra train sets for the Canadian, Super Continental and Atlantica were went to Portland and San Francisco for the same reason. Once Amtrak had the Northeast Corridor back going and stations back open (a process that, thanks to fast-moving volunteers and freight company track repair crews as well as Amtrak's own people, took less than 48 hours), train travel in the United States went mad. Toronto's GO Transit and Montreal's AMT sent commuter trains to Buffalo, Detroit and Boston to allow Amtrak equipment to move to other duties, and CN supplied motive power of their own to other users. American railroads did the same, and in several incredible cases steam locomotives meant for excursion services were dispatched to help Amtrak with the load. Amtrak sent out every bit of equipment they had and anything they could get their hands on to handle the sudden load. People, to the surprise of few, tolerated Amtrak's inability to handle the load well, knowing of the company doing everything its power to move people and goods. Between the huge efforts and the Canadian and American high-speed lines being worth their weight in gold in the days after the attacks, in October 2001, when the United States Congress bailed out their airlines, they dropped a monster appropriation for Amtrak - both for over five billion dollars worth of new equipment for its intercity routes and for a planned high-speed system for the Midwestern United States, as well as expansions of existing Northeast Corridor, Keystone Corridor, Texas, Florida and California high-speed systems. From 2002 until the 2020s, the world's rail engineers found themselves focused heavily on the United States, as Amtrak built better than 8,500 miles of high-speed rail lines. Canada and the United States co-operated on the newest West Coast system for these lines, building the Northwest High-Speed System in the 2000s and 2010s, running from Whistler, British Columbia, through Vancouver, Richmond, Bellingham, Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia, crossing into the United States at Portland and then serving Salem and Eugene, Oregon.
Perhaps more amazing than the 9/11 attacks themselves and the immediate response was what happened after. The international response was one of aghast horror and loud support for whatever the United States chose to do to bring justice for its immense losses. Perhaps most stunned was the Middle Eastern countries - the President of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, spoke for most when he called 9/11 "A crime with few comparisons in human history" and that "no matter our quarrels, nothing justifies this. Nothing, and we all know it is nothing because we need only look at the people we love, and know that nearly four thousand people now can not do that, and we can all imagine what we would feel like if that had been one of us". Particularly geopolitically changing, however, was revelations by the FBI in the weeks after the attack that twenty of the twenty-three terrorists involved in the attack were from Saudi Arabia. While the government of Saudi Arabia loudly claimed that they had nothing to do with the attacks (and no proof of otherwise has ever been found), it did cause a massive rift in the Middle East. While the governmental links never broke, Americans wouldn't soon forgive the Saudis, and the move ultimately resulted in a quite-decisive long-term shift in the diplomatic power in the region away from the House of Saud towards, particularly, their arch-rivals in Tehran. Later on, this would cause a sizable divide between the Saudis and their Arab brothers. In the United States, a number of initial hate crimes against Muslims hardly lasted a week (and nearly all of those responsible for those would end up facing legal repercussions for their actions), but the shift in every other way towards them was notable almost immediately. The Muslim community in the United States had never suffered from a lack of patriotism towards their country, and they if anything were the angriest towards the terrorists themselves. Muslim societies and mosques raised over $20 million for 9/11 victims, and numerous cases of Muslims in the media, from famed architect Zaha Hadid to boxing icon Muhammad Ali, angrily calling out Muslim terrorists was across the media everywhere.
The discovery of Al-Qaeda's being the planners and executors of the 9/11 attacks caused massive rage all around the world, and the discovery of the involvement of the Taliban in Afghanistan in sheltering Al-Qaeda terrorists proved a line much too far for the West, as a massive coalition of the West's armed forces gathered to go after those responsible. Despite this, great care was taken to make sure the operation included Muslim countries and armed forces, and that didn't prove hard to accomplish. Beyond that, Washington was only too keen to make 9/11 a catalyst for greater understanding between the West and the Muslim world, and they went to considerable lengths to advance this, including inviting the world's Muslim leaders to visit Ground Zero and speak about what they felt was the differences in the world, while at the same time working on what indeed was the root cause of the supporters of terror. It would become clear in the 2000s what was going on in the world, and even as the first attack forces of the War in Afghanistan landed there in October 2001, the world was understanding what was going on in the Muslim world, and it didn't make things easier for anyone.
In the years since the Ottawa Treaty, the independence of Palestine and the normalization of relations between Israel and its neighbors in Jordan and Egypt as well as Iran and Morocco (followed by Tunisia in 1984 and Lebanon in 1986), the portions of the Middle East that were shifting in favor of more open societies - which an averted revolution had forced in Iran and a civil war had forced in Lebanon, along with desires for social advancement in Palestine, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco - had rapidly seen social norms change as well as political ones, as greater freedom of speech and thought and growing prosperity brought about a steady repudiation of Islamism as an ideology as its holes could be seen quite clearly. By 2001, the Assad brothers in Syria and Moammar Gaddafi in Libya were also joining the party, both out of desire to avoid potential revolutions themselves and grow their countries' economic potential. In Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Iraq, Sudan and Pakistan, however, decades of strict authoritarian rule and harder-line interpretations of Islam hade brought about highly calcified societies, and the inability to find outlets for disagreements over policy had led to growth in the appeal of Islamism in these countries, which when combined with authoritarian rule had invariably pushed some into the hands of those who would use violent ends to achieve their goals, and for the leaders of Al-Qaeda, the presence of western troops in the Holy Land and the normalization of relations with Israel by other Arab states was reason enough for them to attack the West.
Even as the War in Afghanistan began, the world was already leaning on the more calcified Muslim societies to act as a catalyst for change, though progress here was limited in the larger states (Pakistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia) and slower in the smaller ones, even as Iran's efforts to make itself the center of the "Advanced Muslim World" in the eyes of the West - efforts that dated to the White Revolution - continued to bear fruit and make life difficult for the Arabs of the Saudi Kingdom and the Gulf States and India's push to become the nation of the future made life increasingly difficult for Pakistan.
For Canada, what became known as Operation Apollo began on October 15, 2001, as the Canadian Special Air Service and 427 Squadron RCAF was deployed, alongside American, British, Australian and Palestinian special forces units, to assist the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. Supported by American, Canadian, British and Iranian airstrikes and huge defections, the Taliban collapsed across much of the northern portion of the country - and that was before Task Force 57 arrived.
Task Force 57 was the name for the vast fleet that the Commonwealth and the French had agreed to send to support the Americans. Commanded by RCN Admiral Stephen McMillan, the fleet was centered on HMCS Canada, HMS Queen Elizabeth II, HMAS Australia and FS Charles de Gaulle, and included over 60 vessels of all four nations and other contributions from the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa and Singapore. The vast naval force came into being when Canada and Queen Elizabeth II met up with the Charles de Gaulle in the Mediterranean on November 16, 2001, and began operations off of Iran on November 29, attacking Taliban targets in Kandahar province. Ably supported by Iranian tankers, the Task Force launched such a number of operations that the American carriers United States and John F. Kennedy were able to retire for a four week period to Darwin, Australia, allowing the Canadian, British, Australian and French aircraft to handle business. They did an incredibly good job of it, too - indeed, when French reconnaissance satellites reported suspicious activities near Gardez on December 19, 2001, Canadian SAS troopers confirmed the reports the next day, and then on Christmas Eve two Australian RF-111C recon aircraft confirmed the presence of Taliban units in the area, leading to Operation Anaconda, where American ground units joined the Commonwealth units in fighting in the region, a battle that was successful in routing the Taliban out of the area. But a bigger prize was to await six weeks later east of Gardez.
Having routed the Taliban in much of eastern Afghanistan, on January 26, 2002 the Western forces assaulted the Tora Bora cave complex near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. American, British, Canadian and Australian special forces as well as Iranian mountain troops and a company of Palestinian airmobile troops, supported by American, Dutch and British attack helicopters, British fighter-bombers and Canadian and Australian strike aircraft, conducted a massive raid on the Tora Bora complex. Al-Qaeda's operatives fought bitterly to the end, but they were unable to hang on, and the operation captured Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Saif al-Adel and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, while Mohammed Atef and Asim Abdulrahman were both killed in the operations. The operation effectively took the head off of Al-Qaeda for the moment, but it was a vast success, and what followed it was more so.
Despite calls for him to them to be tried in America, both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri were tried by a special prosecutional court set up in Jerusalem, following Islamic law principles and chaired by three judges, the chief judge being the Muslim cleric who was the one who also was responsible for Jerusalem who had also selected the other two. Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri were allowed to choose their own legal counsel and make their own cases. The trial, which lasted ten days, was broadcasted live all around the world and gave much of the world their first knowledge of what a trial by Islamic law looked like, and the approval of it in courts around the world was considerable, approval that grew when both were judged guilty, and both were sentenced to life imprisonment in the nation that had suffered the most grave wounds from their actions - that obviously being the United States. Both Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri were then sent to the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado in the United States, where both would live out the rest of their lives. Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri both would later seek judgements in American courts that the trial had been unfair, but the United States Supreme Court denied to hear the case in 2010, and Bin Laden died of kidney failure while still a prisoner at ADX Florence in May 2014.
Operational Apollo's first acts, namely that of kicking over the Taliban, also broadcast to the world where Iran stood on the issues of the day. Tehran, who was heartily sick and tired of the Taliban and fully aware of the ability to use the changes in the world to increase its stature in the world, was only too happy to allow ships to offload in Iran and make their way from the ports of Chahbehar and Bandar Abbas across Iran to Afghanistan, with the Iranians even upgrading highways and railways to allow easier support of NATO units in Afghanistan, and Iranian units were involved in the operations from the moment they began. Iran's armed forces quickly proved a surprise to the West - their heavy armored units were reasonable, but their mountain troops and special forces units were remarkably good, a situation mirrored with other Arabs, the Palestinians most of all - though as the Palestinians, well aware of Israeli security concerns and the huge forces disparity between them, had always trained their armed forces to a very fine edge.
Iran's massive wealth growth and its steady improvements in the freedoms and rights of its society in the 1980s and 1990s - demanded as a result of the averted revolutions and followed by the new politicians as a result - was rapidly turning Iran into a much more progressive nation than most of its Middle Eastern brothers, and knowing that this was a key to the growth in the country's wealth and power during the same period, openly encouraged this. The desire of the Iranians to turn their country as the junction of East and West also factored into it, and while the grandiose plans of the Imperial Era were backed off considerably in the 1980s, some vast plans remained, and by the 1990s many of these returned, in many places driven by the House of Pahlavi themselves - even as their unquestioned power over Iran had been ended by the political changes of the 1980s, Shah Reza Pahlavi II was one of Iran's most famous people and he wielded massive influence within Iran, and the Pahlavis channeled their vast wealth in the 1980s and 1990s into a vast series of ventures, programs and ideas meant to improve Iran's position in the world.
The creation of Pahlavi's Persian Crown Award in 1985 (done to allow him to use his immense wealth and knowledge in Iran to advance Iranians who had done good deeds for their country or all of humanity) became a sign of what the House of Pahlavi saw themselves as in modern Iran, and the rest of the House of Pahlavi proved genuinely dedicated to advancing Iran, including a highly-visible role in the by Prince Ali Reza Pahlavi, the younger brother of the Shah and a Lieutenant Colonel of Iran's 24th Mountain Infantry Division, in the Assault on Tora Bora. Perhaps even more stunning to Iran was the first meeting between the Shah's second wife, Queen Soraya, and his widow, Empress Farah, in Los Angeles in 1992, a meeting which rapidly resulted in Soraya's return to the Royal Family - despite not technically being part of the Royal bloodline, Soraya was accepted by the Pahlavis as one of the family, a sign that past actions were able to be forgiven in the modern Pahlavi dynasty, and that Soraya, whose marriage had been ended as a result of her infertility and the demands placed upon her to bear a male heir, was a worthy member of Iran's elite. Perhaps more shocking events came in November 2000, when the retirement of Prime Minister Mohammed Khatami resulted in the election of former Tehran judge and influential minister Shirin Ebadi as the Prime Minister of Iran. Initial shock at Ebadi's election among some sections of Iran's elite dissipated quickly, though, as Ebadi deftly handled the 2000s for Iran, retiring from her position after fourteen years in power in 2014 and being one of the world's most powerful female politicians during the time.
Iran's wealth and desires to the junction of East and West put them massively at odds with their Arab brothers, but while this hadn't been an issue with the Cold War as a context, after the 9/11 attacks the calculus changed. Huge resource wealth was making sure relations didn't go completely south on all sides, but the many flaws of the societies of the harder-line Arab states were soon blown right out into the open, despite the best attempts of the nations involved (particularly the Saudis) to fight back the perceptions. Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates found the world's hostiliy towards Islamic fundamentalism in the 2000s a sign that they needed to move away from the highly calcified societies, a process sure to be painful but one which was made necessary by the world's changes, while Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan in particular fought the changes in the world.
While the massive initial invasions by the West had substantial success in flushing out the Taliban, they quickly retreated into a masive guerilla campaign - but would soon quickly find out that the Malayan Emergency and Vietnam War had taught more than a few lessons to the West, and after the initial destruction of the Taliban government was completed in the summer of 2003, the developments of the Northern Alliance - which had initially all banded together to fight the Taliban - found themselves having to work out their differences for a peaceful, more ethnically balanced Afghanistan. These elements, when combined with major development projects funded by the West, caused public support for the Taliban to sink dramatically. By spring 2004, however, it was clear that the Taliban were being supplied from Pakistan and were drawing large number of recruits from there. Operation Challenger was the result, launched on April 25, 2004, to seal off the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Led by Canadian Army with British, French and Iranian units, the operation was largely divided between British heavy units controlling the south ends of Kandahar, Helmand and Nimruz provinces, Iranian mountain troops and Canadian infantry drawing the job of stopping infiltrations across Paktia, Paktika, Chost, Nargahar and Logar provinces and French units undertaking similar operations in Konar and Nuristan provinces as well as securing the Khyber Pass. This was done while American, German and Australian units went right after the Taliban's home turf in northern Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul provinces, in every case helped by a great many Afghans themselves.
The operation proved a long process, but through 2004 and 2005 was clearly succeeding, even as Pakistani attempts at stopping infiltration were effectively useless and ended up doing little more than stirring chaos in Pakistan's nearly-lawless tribal border regions. The Iranians had pioneered the idea of the use of lightweight all-terrain vehicles, motorcycles and buggies was rapidly copied by the other nations involved for their usefulness, usually with the best possible engine noise reduction, the Canadian Army's use of a very large number of helicopters also helped immensely, and everyone involved began using both larger UAVs for surveillance and smaller ones used at company or even in some cases platoon level - all necessary to reduce the number of infiltrations into Afghanistan. Pakistan was soon also under heavy pressure to stop the infiltrations. The taking on of the Taliban insurgency, however, proved a mostly successful operation in their mountainous heartlands, and by late 2005 the Taliban were losing even their strongholds, retreating into Pakistan, causing a whole new set of problems for both the Pakistanis and NATO.