Those of us who are old enough remember where we were when the news broke on Sept. 11, 2001. I was a senior in my Manhattan high school, standing on the rooftop, slack-jawed, as I watched smoke from the collapsing twin towers envelop the downtown skyline. My fellow students and I were soon sent home. We trudged out of school en masse, hushed and silent. It was, as many recall, a balmy, sunny day, save for the dark cloud looming over half the city.
Even within the small bubble of our lives, let alone the wounded metropolis that was our home, it was clear that something had fundamentally changed. The world turned in both dramatic and imperceptible ways in the aftermath of 9/11. Thousands of people lost their lives to al-Qaeda’s brazen strike on the United States. Hundreds of thousands more would die in the sprawling wars and conflicts that unfurled across the planet.
A decade later, the United States succeeded in cornering and killing Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader behind the 9/11 plot. But the years in between — and those that followed — saw the spread of Islamist extremism, not its defeat. Wars aimed at regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq turned into failed nation-building exercises, which had their own bleak codas: The catastrophic rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, on one hand, and the desperate American evacuation from Kabul and the return of the Taliban, on the other.
On 9/11, Americans rallied around a moment of shocking national tragedy and trauma. Twenty years later, under a government with heightened powers of surveillance and in a society increasingly defined by political polarization, they must reckon with their country’s legacy of strategic mistakes abroad — as must the swaths of the world still grappling with the aftereffects.
A weakened, yet enduring, al-Qaeda menace
by Claire Parker
The attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, catapulted al-Qaeda from relative obscurity to a household name in the United States. As the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon crumbled, it became clear that the United States had underestimated the threat posed by the Islamist extremist group, led by a Saudi outcast in Afghanistan who dreamed of uniting Muslims and destroying the “myth of American invincibility.”
The cataclysm of 9/11 proved a powerful inspiration for a generation of Islamist extremists. But it also provoked a reaction that some Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, who had reportedly opposed attacking the United States, had feared. Most Muslims around the world were disgusted by the mass murder of civilians in the name of their religion. And rather than turning Americans against their government’s foreign interventions as bin Laden had hoped, the attacks rallied them behind what became America’s longest war.
Still, al-Qaeda has shown remarkable resilience, even after two decades. It has metastasized across the Middle East, Asia and Africa — and though the group is weaker than on the eve of 9/11, the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan may offer it an opening. Read the full story.
The sprawling, dark legacy of U.S. counterterrorism
Twenty years after the attacks of 9/11, the United States has yet to experience a terrorist strike on the homeland anywhere close to that shocking scale. But few even among the Washington establishment see that as an undisputed mark of triumph. Instead, they grapple with debates over American imperial hubris and overreach. Abroad, successive U.S. administrations shoulder a shared legacy of ruinous wars and failed nation-building. At home, the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have seen the curtailing of civil liberties for some communities, an expansion of mass surveillance and the deepening of political divisions.
Americans broadly supported the George W. Bush administration’s decision to invade Afghanistan, where the ruling Taliban had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda. The punitive mission turned into something far greater than an anti-crime raid against a militant outfit operating in rustic obscurity. Read the full story.
What if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq?
Much of the American public and political establishment that got swept up in the George W. Bush administration’s rush to punish “evildoers” spent little time interrogating the connection between the events of 9/11 and the American decision to “preemptively” invade Iraq less than two years later to topple the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. A Washington Post poll in September 2003 found that close to 7 in 10 Americans believed that it was at least “likely” that Hussein was directly involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
That, of course, proved to be preposterous, as was much of the case Bush and his allies made about the imminent threat posed by the Iraqi regime’s phantom weapons of mass destruction. Animated by a neoconservative zeal to oust enemy regimes and wield American might to make right — and unhindered by the bulk of the Washington press corps — the Bush administration plunged the United States and its coalition partners into a war and eventual occupation that would reshape the political map of the Middle East, distract from America’s parallel intervention in Afghanistan and provoke new cycles of chaos and violence.
But what if the United States had opted against invading Iraq? It’s impossible to unwind what the Bush administration unleashed, but indulge us as we puzzle through just a few elements of this counterfactual proposition. Read the full story.
The waning of the American superpower
The aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks marked the height of a particular American moment on the world stage. Here was the United States, no longer just the triumphant victor of the Cold War, but a wounded “unipolar” superpower ready to mete out justice on a global scale. The enemy was not a rival hegemonic power, but an amorphous concept (“terror”) that American leadership linked to both a web of Islamist extremists and adversarial autocratic regimes. The results were the costly invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the massive expansion of the U.S. security state, and a new global awareness of the limits — rather than the potency — of American power.
In the full bloom of its post-9/11 mandate, the George W. Bush administration shrugged off the growing concerns of some European allies over its invasion of Iraq and the reprimands of top officials at the United Nations. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” an anonymous White House official, widely believed to be Republican strategist Karl Rove, told the New York Times Magazine in 2004. “We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Two decades after 9/11, that legacy of hubris hangs over Washington, a bad odor that successive administrations have tried and failed to dispel. No matter the messiness of the U.S. withdrawal last month, polling shows the overwhelming majority of the American public still supports pulling troops out of Afghanistan. Few serious politicians in either of the country’s major parties call for new military interventions overseas. A growing body of lawmakers also wants to curb the White House’s powers to wage war in the first place. Read the full story.
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