September 11 and the War on Terror
Nineteen men with box cutters turned the world's most powerful military against two countries that didn't attack it
Open
Two countries paid for what happened that morning. Neither one attacked it.
Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi citizens. None were Iraqi. None were Afghan.
Eighteen months after the towers fell, the United States invaded a country with no hijackers in it, on a case that fell apart.
Scene 1Eight forty six
Eight forty six in the morning, Eastern time. American Airlines Flight Eleven strikes the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight One Seventy Five hits the South Tower.
At nine thirty seven, American Airlines Flight Seventy Seven strikes the Pentagon. At ten oh three, United Airlines Flight Ninety Three crashes into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after its passengers storm the cockpit, having learned by phone what has already happened in New York.
The South Tower falls at nine fifty nine. The North Tower follows at ten twenty eight.
Two thousand nine hundred seventy seven people are dead: two thousand seven hundred fifty three in New York, one hundred eighty four at the Pentagon, forty in Pennsylvania.
Scene 2Nineteen men
The hijackers are members of al-Qaeda, an organization Osama bin Laden built in the late nineteen eighties. Bin Laden is a Saudi millionaire who fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan alongside CIA funded mujahideen.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed conceives the operation in nineteen ninety six. The operational cell trains at flight schools in Florida and Arizona.
Nine days after the attacks, President George W. Bush addresses a joint session of Congress and sets the terms for what comes next.
· Address to Joint Session of Congress · September 20, 2001
“Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
Scene 3Twenty six days
Within twenty six days, the United States invades Afghanistan. The Taliban government, which had sheltered bin Laden, falls by December two thousand one.
Scene 4The case for Iraq
Eighteen months later, the case for a second war rests on the claim that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction.
On February the fifth, two thousand three, Secretary of State Colin Powell presents that case to the UN Security Council himself.
· Presentation to the UN Security Council · February 5, 2003
“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
No such weapons are ever found. The Senate Intelligence Committee later concludes that every major claim in that presentation was unsupported by the underlying intelligence.
Scene 5Baghdad
The invasion begins March the twentieth. Baghdad falls on April the ninth.
On May the first, Bush declares major combat operations over aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, beneath a banner reading Mission Accomplished. The insurgency that follows lasts eight years.
Scene 6Nine hundred thousand
The wars metastasize. By two thousand twenty one, the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates nine hundred thousand to nine hundred twenty nine thousand people killed directly in post-nine eleven war zones across Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya.
Thirty seven million people are displaced. The financial cost to the United States exceeds eight trillion dollars.
Scene 7At home
The attacks restructure American governance. The USA PATRIOT Act, signed October the twenty sixth, two thousand one, expands surveillance authority across federal agencies.
The Department of Homeland Security, created in two thousand two, consolidates twenty two agencies into the third largest federal department.
Guantanamo Bay detention camp opens in January two thousand two. It holds seven hundred eighty detainees. As of two thousand twenty five, it still holds fifteen.
Three years later, the Commission that investigated the attacks delivers its final verdict, on the last page of its report.
· The 9/11 Commission Report, final page · 2004
“They came to slaughter as many Americans as possible, and we, too, are at war, on the battlefield and in our souls.”
Five accounts
Five accounts of the two decades that followed.
victorAmerican Establishment
American Establishment
The first account is written into law within hours. By nightfall, Congress authorizes all necessary and appropriate force against whoever planned or aided the attacks. The vote is ninety eight to nothing in the Senate, four hundred twenty to one in the House.
The sole dissenter is Representative Barbara Lee of California, who warns the authorization is too broad. Twenty years later it remains the legal basis for military operations in at least seven countries.
The intelligence apparatus built afterward disrupts dozens of plots, and bin Laden himself is killed by SEAL Team Six in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May the second, two thousand eleven. No second major attack reaches the American homeland in twenty years.
Three days after the attack, bullhorn in hand on the rubble at Ground Zero, Bush tells the rescue workers.
“I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
Read the full account
Narrative
The second plane hit the South Tower at 9:03 AM on live television. By nightfall, Congress had passed a joint resolution authorizing "all necessary and appropriate force" against those who "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the attacks. The vote was 98-0 in the Senate, 420-1 in the House. The sole dissenter, Representative Barbara Lee of California, warned that the authorization was too broad. By 2021 it remained the legal basis for military operations in at least seven countries.
The Bush administration framed the response as existential self-defense. The National Security Strategy of September 2002 codified the Bush Doctrine: the United States would act preemptively against threats before they materialized. Afghanistan fell in weeks. The Taliban regime that had sheltered bin Laden and refused to surrender him was replaced by a transitional government under Hamid Karzai, installed at the Bonn Conference in December 2001. The speed of the victory appeared to validate the doctrine.
Iraq followed a different logic. The administration argued that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, maintained ties to al-Qaeda, and posed a gathering threat that could not be contained. Powell's February 2003 UN presentation, which he later called "a blot" on his record, displayed satellite imagery, intercepted communications, and a vial of simulated anthrax. The invasion began on March 20. Baghdad fell on April 9. On May 1, Bush declared major combat operations over aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln beneath a banner reading "Mission Accomplished." The insurgency that followed lasted eight years.
The establishment narrative holds that the war on terror prevented another attack on the American homeland for two decades. The intelligence apparatus created after 9/11 (the Director of National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center, the TSA, the fusion centers) detected and disrupted dozens of plots. Bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team Six in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011. The administration's defenders argue that Abu Ghraib, the WMD intelligence failures and the chaos of de-Ba'athification were errors of execution, not of the fundamental decision to respond with force.
Arguments
- Authorization of force was a near-unanimous democratic mandate in response to an act of war
- Preemptive action against gathering threats was necessary in an age of non-state actors with catastrophic ambitions
- No second major attack on the American homeland occurred for twenty years after 9/11
- Errors in execution do not invalidate the strategic necessity of the response
Sources
- Decision Points
- The 9/11 Commission Report
- Bush at War
vanquishedAfghan and Iraqi Civilian
Afghan and Iraqi Civilian
The second account begins on October the seventh, two thousand one, when American bombs start falling on Kabul, a city that had already survived the Soviet invasion, a civil war, and the Taliban's takeover.
The Americans have come for a Saudi fugitive. Within weeks he slips across the border into Pakistan with a small escort and lives another decade. The Afghans stay under the bombs.
The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission counts over thirty one thousand civilian deaths between two thousand one and two thousand twenty one. In Iraq, the Iraq Body Count project counts over two hundred thousand civilian deaths between two thousand three and two thousand twenty three.
Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number One, signed that May by L. Paul Bremer, dissolves the four hundred thousand member Iraqi army and dismisses thirty to fifty thousand Sunni civil servants. Those men, stripped of income, become the recruiting base for the insurgency, and later, for the Islamic State.
By August two thousand twenty one the Afghan government the United States spent two point three trillion dollars building dissolves without a fight, and President Ashraf Ghani flees the country.
An Afghan villager, unnamed in the record, quoted in Dexter Filkins' book The Forever War, on a wedding struck from the air.
“They bombed the wedding. They said it was a mistake. They always say it is a mistake.”
Read the full account
Narrative
On October 7, 2001, American bombs began falling on Kabul. The city's population was 1.5 million. Many had survived two decades of war: the Soviet invasion, the mujahideen civil war, the Taliban's takeover. Now the Americans had come to find a Saudi fugitive and his Egyptian deputy. Within weeks, B-52s were carpet-bombing Tora Bora while bin Laden slipped across the Pakistani border with a small escort. He would live another decade. The Afghans remained under the bombs.
The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission documented over 31,000 civilian deaths between 2001 and 2021. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism tracked over 13,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, killing between 10,000 and 17,000 people, of whom 800 to 1,750 were civilians, including 252 to 400 children. Individual strikes became infamous: the Kunduz hospital attack of October 3, 2015, killed 42 people in a Doctors Without Borders trauma center. A drone strike in Kabul on August 29, 2021, three days before the final withdrawal, killed Zemari Ahmadi, an aid worker, and nine members of his family, including seven children. The Pentagon initially called it a "righteous strike."
In Iraq, the civilian toll was greater. The Iraq Body Count project documented over 200,000 civilian deaths between 2003 and 2023. The Lancet survey of 2006, using cluster sampling, estimated 654,965 excess deaths through July 2006 alone. The de-Ba'athification order of May 2003 (Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 1, signed by L. Paul Bremer) dismissed 30,000 to 50,000 Sunni civil servants and dissolved the 400,000-member Iraqi army. Those men, stripped of income and status, became the recruiting base for the insurgency and, later, for the Islamic State.
Abu Ghraib prison became the emblem. In April 2004, photographs emerged showing American soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees: hooded men stacked naked in pyramids, a man standing on a box with wires attached to his hands, a soldier holding a leash around a crawling prisoner's neck. Eleven soldiers were convicted. No officer above the rank of colonel was prosecuted. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who oversaw the prison, was demoted. Stress positions, sleep deprivation and sensory bombardment had been authorized through a chain of legal memoranda running from the Office of Legal Counsel to the Secretary of Defense.
By August 2021, when the Taliban retook Kabul in eleven days, the Afghan government the United States had spent $2.3 trillion building dissolved without a fight. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. Afghan women, who had gained access to schools and public life over twenty years, faced immediate restrictions. The interpreters, drivers, and analysts who had worked with American forces crowded the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport. Some clung to departing aircraft. A suicide bombing at Abbey Gate on August 26 killed 13 American service members and at least 170 Afghans.
Arguments
- Two countries with no connection to the September 11 hijackers bore the brunt of the American response
- Civilian death toll exceeded the original attack by orders of magnitude
- De-Ba'athification and army dissolution created the conditions for insurgency and ISIS
- Twenty years of occupation ended with the same regime in power in Afghanistan
Sources
- The Forever War
- The Costs of War Project
- The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism
- No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes
- Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia
revisionistIntelligence Community: The Blowback Thesis
Intelligence Community: The Blowback Thesis
The third account starts in nineteen seventy nine, when the CIA launches Operation Cyclone: three billion dollars in arms and training for Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation, the largest covert operation in CIA history, run through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.
The CIA did not directly fund bin Laden himself. But it armed and empowered the ecosystem he built al-Qaeda inside.
Bin Laden's own nineteen ninety six fatwa names three grievances: American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, American support for Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory, and sanctions on Iraq that the United Nations estimated had contributed to the deaths of five hundred thousand Iraqi children.
The failures were institutional. The CIA knew Khalid al-Mihdhar had a US visa and had met suspected al-Qaeda operatives in Kuala Lumpur. It did not tell the FBI until August the twenty third, two thousand one, nineteen days before the attacks.
Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism coordinator, testified he had warned National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in January two thousand one that al-Qaeda was an existential threat.
“Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you.”
Read the full account
Narrative
In 1979, the CIA launched Operation Cyclone, funneling $3 billion in arms and training to Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation. The program, the largest covert operation in CIA history, ran through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Among the recipients: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who later joined the Taliban insurgency against the Americans, and the network of Arab volunteers that coalesced around a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. The CIA did not directly fund bin Laden (this is a persistent oversimplification), but it armed and empowered the ecosystem in which he built al-Qaeda.
Chalmers Johnson published his book Blowback in 2000, a year before the attacks, and defined the term as "the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people." The concept originates from CIA internal jargon. Johnson argued that decades of American military bases, covert operations, and support for authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and Central Asia had created conditions in which anti-American violence was not irrational but predictable. Bin Laden's 1996 fatwa cited three specific grievances: American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia (the land of the two holy mosques), US support for Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, and sanctions against Iraq that the UN estimated had contributed to the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.
The intelligence failures were institutional. The 9/11 Commission documented a "wall" between CIA foreign intelligence and FBI domestic investigation that prevented information sharing. The CIA's Counterterrorism Center knew that al-Mihdhar had a US visa and had met with suspected al-Qaeda operatives in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000. They did not inform the FBI until August 23, 2001, nineteen days before the attacks. The FBI's Minneapolis field office arrested Zacarias Moussaoui on August 16, 2001, on immigration charges after a flight school instructor reported that Moussaoui wanted to learn to fly large jets but had no interest in takeoffs or landings. FBI headquarters declined to seek a warrant to search his laptop.
Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism coordinator under both Clinton and Bush, testified before the 9/11 Commission that he had warned National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in January 2001 that al-Qaeda was an "existential threat." On August 6, 2001, the President's Daily Brief carried the headline "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush remained on vacation at his Crawford, Texas ranch. No cabinet-level meeting on al-Qaeda was held before September 11. Clarke's testimony included a public apology: "Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you."
Arguments
- CIA covert operations in Afghanistan during the 1980s empowered the networks that produced al-Qaeda
- Bin Laden's stated grievances were responses to specific American policies, not civilizational hatred
- Multiple intelligence agencies had actionable warnings that were not shared or acted upon
- The post-9/11 response replicated the pattern, with military intervention creating the conditions for future blowback
Sources
- Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
- Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
- Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden
bystanderMuslim Diaspora: Under Suspicion
Muslim Diaspora: Under Suspicion
The fourth account begins the day after the attacks, when Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, is shot dead by a man who told friends he wanted to kill a towelhead. Sodhi was not Muslim. He was wearing a turban.
In the following twelve months, the FBI records a one thousand six hundred seventeen percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes, from twenty eight incidents in the prior year to four hundred eighty one.
The USA PATRIOT Act lets the government detain non-citizens on the attorney general's certification alone. Eighty three thousand men from Muslim-majority countries register with immigration authorities. Thirteen thousand are placed in deportation proceedings. None are charged with terrorism.
The NYPD's Demographics Unit infiltrates Muslim student organizations and maps every mosque in the northeastern United States. In fourteen years it produces zero terrorism leads.
A Muslim American student, unnamed in the record, quoted in a report on that surveillance, put it this way.
“I am not the enemy. I am a citizen. But my government treats me like a suspect.”
Read the full account
Narrative
On September 12, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, was shot and killed by a man who told friends he wanted to "kill a towelhead." Sodhi was the first person murdered in a post-9/11 hate crime. He was not Muslim. He was wearing a turban. In the twelve months after September 11, the FBI recorded a 1,617% increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States, from 28 incidents in 2000 to 481 in 2001.
The legal architecture arrived quickly. The USA PATRIOT Act, signed on October 26, 2001, expanded the government's authority to conduct surveillance, issue National Security Letters without court approval, and detain non-citizens on the attorney general's certification. Within weeks, the FBI launched the Absconder Apprehension Initiative, targeting 6,000 men from Muslim-majority countries for deportation. The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), implemented in 2002, required males over 16 from 25 countries, 24 of them Muslim-majority, to register with immigration authorities. Of the 83,000 who registered, 13,000 were placed in deportation proceedings. None were charged with terrorism.
The NYPD's Demographics Unit, revealed by the Associated Press in 2011, had infiltrated Muslim student organizations, mapped every mosque in the northeastern United States, and sent undercover officers into Muslim-owned businesses, cafes, and bookstores. In fourteen years, the program produced zero terrorism leads. It was disbanded in 2014. The FBI's use of informants in Muslim communities (documented by Trevor Aaronson in The Terror Factory) created a pattern in which undercover agents proposed, planned, and supplied materials for plots that would not have existed without government initiation. Of 508 federal terrorism prosecutions between 2001 and 2013, Aaronson found that nearly half involved informants.
For 3.45 million American Muslims in 2001, and for the far larger global Muslim population, September 11 imposed a burden of collective suspicion. The phrase "moderate Muslim" entered common usage, carrying the implication that moderation was the exception. Bush himself visited the Islamic Center of Washington on September 17, 2001, and declared that "Islam is peace." But the structural apparatus his administration built treated Muslim identity as a risk factor. Guantanamo Bay held 780 detainees, the vast majority never charged. The CIA operated black sites in Thailand, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania where detainees were subjected to waterboarding, rectal feeding, and sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours. The Senate Intelligence Committee's 2014 report on CIA interrogation concluded that the techniques produced no actionable intelligence that was not available through conventional methods.
Arguments
- Muslim communities were subjected to mass surveillance, registration, and infiltration without individualized suspicion
- Hate crimes against Muslims and those perceived as Muslim surged immediately and remained elevated for years
- Government informant programs manufactured terrorism cases that would not have existed otherwise
- Guantanamo and CIA black sites operated outside legal norms applied to any other category of prisoner
Sources
- The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism
- Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program
- Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire
- How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America
academicGlobal South: The Unipolar Fracture
Global South: The Unipolar Fracture
The fifth account starts the day after the attacks too, when the UN Security Council passes Resolution thirteen sixty eight unanimously and NATO invokes Article Five for the first time in its history. For a moment the world aligns behind the United States.
Within eighteen months that alignment shatters. The United States invades Iraq without Security Council authorization. France, Germany, and Russia oppose it. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin argues to the Council that inspections should continue, and receives a standing ovation, an extraordinary breach of protocol.
A year later, Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, gives his own verdict, in a BBC interview.
“From the standpoint of the charter of the United Nations, the war was illegal.”
The doctrine behind the invasion, that the United States could strike any nation it judged a threat, based on its own intelligence, without Security Council authorization, becomes a precedent. Russia later cites the same logic invading Georgia, and Ukraine.
Read the full account
Narrative
On September 12, 2001, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1368 unanimously, recognizing the attacks as a threat to international peace and security. NATO invoked Article 5 (collective defense) for the first time in its history. For a brief interval, the entire international order aligned behind the United States. Within eighteen months, the United States had shattered that alignment by invading Iraq without Security Council authorization.
The Iraq war was the inflection point. France, Germany, and Russia opposed the invasion. On February 14, 2003, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin delivered a speech to the Security Council arguing that inspections should continue and that war was not justified. He received a standing ovation, an extraordinary breach of Council protocol. The United States proceeded without a second resolution. International law scholars debated whether the invasion constituted aggression under the UN Charter. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, stated in September 2004 that the invasion was "not in conformity with the UN Charter" and was therefore "illegal."
For the Global South, the war on terror confirmed a longer pattern. The doctrine of preemptive war, articulated in the 2002 National Security Strategy, asserted that the United States could strike any nation it deemed a threat, based on its own intelligence assessment, without prior authorization from the Security Council. This was sovereignty for the powerful and subjection for the rest. Under the extraordinary rendition program, the CIA kidnapped suspects on the streets of Milan, Stockholm, and Islamabad and transported them to black sites or to allied countries known to practice torture. The program violated the sovereignty of allied nations. Italy convicted 23 CIA agents in absentia for the 2003 kidnapping of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr from a Milan street.
The precedent radiated outward. Russia invoked the logic of preemptive security when it intervened in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. China cited American treatment of Uyghur Muslims' alleged terrorist connections when defending its Xinjiang detention camps. Saudi Arabia and the UAE justified their intervention in Yemen partly through counter-terrorism framing. The war on terror did not create a safer world order. It created a world in which powerful states could name any adversary a terrorist and act accordingly.
The economic architecture followed the security apparatus. The Office of Foreign Assets Control expanded its sanctions regime. SWIFT, the international financial messaging system, granted the US Treasury access to transaction records under the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. Dollar dominance became a weapon: any bank touching the US financial system could be compelled to enforce American sanctions. Countries from Iran to Venezuela to North Korea found themselves locked out of the global financial system by executive order. The weaponization of financial infrastructure accelerated the search for alternatives that gained momentum two decades later: China's CIPS system, Russia's SPFS, the BRICS push for de-dollarization.
Arguments
- The Iraq invasion without UN authorization fractured the post-WWII international legal order
- Preemptive war doctrine provided a template that other powers adopted for their own interventions
- Extraordinary rendition violated the sovereignty of allied nations
- Financial infrastructure was weaponized as an extension of the security state
Sources
- The Rise and Fall of the Unipolar Concert
- The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
- Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump
The turn
And here is what each account cannot afford to say.
The establishment's account counts twenty years without a second homeland attack, and says nothing about Abu Ghraib, the failed hunt for weapons of mass destruction, or two decades spent failing to build a government in Kabul that could survive without American troops.
From the record
Fabrication of WMD intelligence and manipulation of public fearCivilian casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and SomaliaCIA black sites, extraordinary rendition, and enhanced interrogation (torture)Twenty-year failure to build stable governance in AfghanistanThe Afghan and Iraqi account documents the dead in exact numbers, and says far less about what the Taliban and Saddam Hussein's own government had already done to those same populations before the bombs arrived.
From the record
Taliban and Saddam Hussein regime atrocities against their own populationsInfrastructure and institutional development during occupation periodsAfghan and Iraqi agency in governance decisions during the occupationIntelligence Community: The Blowback Thesis
The blowback account traces the fatwa to real grievances, and says little about al-Qaeda's own agency: the choice to fly four airliners into buildings was made by men, not by policy alone.
From the record
Al-Qaeda's own ideological agency independent of American policySoviet atrocities in Afghanistan that motivated the original interventionGenuine security improvements in domestic counterterrorism after 9/11Muslim Diaspora: Under Suspicion
The diaspora account documents the surveillance in exact figures, and says less about the plots that same apparatus genuinely disrupted along the way.
From the record
Muslim-American community cooperation with law enforcement and counterterrorism effortsGenuine security threats posed by radicalized individuals within diaspora communitiesInternal debates within Muslim communities about extremism and reformGlobal South: The Unipolar Fracture
The Global South account calls the Iraq invasion illegal under a charter its own coalition had just watched hold. It says little about the counter-terrorism abuses of its own governments that came before this one.
From the record
Genuine security threat posed by al-Qaeda and affiliated groupsReconstruction efforts and democratic institution-building in Afghanistan and IraqGlobal South governments' own counter-terrorism abuses predating 9/11
And zoom out past all five accounts, and the day marks a hinge point on its own terms. It closes twelve years since the Berlin Wall fell, in which American military power looked unchallenged, and opens two decades of asymmetric warfare, indefinite detention, and preemptive invasion.
Close
On August the thirtieth, two thousand twenty one, the last American soldier left Afghanistan.
The Taliban had already retaken Kabul, eleven days before the final withdrawal. The twenty year war ended exactly where it began: with the Taliban in Kabul.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 2001-2021Afghanistan war 2001-2021; Iraq…
- Killed
- 3KSeptember 11; 900,000+, post-9/11 wars through 2021…
- Displaced
- 37Mdisplaced by post-9/11 wars across eight countries
- Place
- United States
Key figures
- Osama bin LadenFounder of al-Qaeda, mastermind of September 11 attacks1957 to 2011
- George W. Bush43rd President of the United States (2001-2009)1946 to ?
- Dick CheneyVice President of the United States (2001-2009), architect of war on terror policy1941 to ?
- Donald RumsfeldSecretary of Defense (2001-2006), directed invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq1932 to 2021
- Mohamed AttaLead hijacker and pilot of American Airlines Flight 111968 to 2001
- Khalid Sheikh MohammedPrincipal architect of the September 11 plot1965 to ?
- Colin PowellSecretary of State (2001-2005), presented WMD case to UN Security Council1937 to 2021
- Barbara LeeSole member of Congress to vote against the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (420-1)1946 to ?
Primary sources
· Address to Joint Session of Congress · September 20, 2001
“Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
· Presentation to the UN Security Council · February 5, 2003
“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
· The 9/11 Commission Report, final page · 2004
“They came to slaughter as many Americans as possible, and we, too, are at war — on the battlefield and in our souls.”
Threads
- The Arab SpringA fruit vendor set himself on fire in a town of 40,000. Within 60 days, three presidents had fallen.
- The Fall of the Berlin WallAt 6:53 p.m. on November 9, 1989, a spokesman misread a memo on live television. The Wall fell by midnight.
- The Cuban Missile CrisisFor thirteen days, one Soviet submarine officer was the only thing between humanity and nuclear war.