On September 11, 2001, nineteen members of al-Qaeda – armed with nothing more sophisticated than box cutters and iron will – hijacked four U.S. commercial aircraft and turned them into veritable cruise missiles.
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Accurate counts of the dead and injured generally seem to be unavailable when it comes to the lives of darker skinned people from the global South. In the years that followed 9/11, President George W. Bush spoke of a “crusade”.
The attackers’ goal was to frighten Americans into changing how they lived, Mr Obama said, adding: “Americans will never give in to fear”.
We’re choosing not just our president, but the leader of the free world.
Rasmussen said that he had been more confident a decade ago in the ability of the United States and other countries to work together in fighting terrorism.
One can think of the massacre of close to a million Tutsis and Hutus in Burundi and Rwanda.
Bin Laden has been dead for years at this point, but many USA officials are still eagerly ‘taking the bait, ‘ consequences be damned.
In the days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when Congress voted to authorize military force against the people who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the hijackings, few Americans could have imagined the resulting manhunt would span from West Africa all the way to the Philippines, and would outlast two two-term presidents.
And a United States military re-engagement in the Middle East is not in the plans of either of the candidates looking to succeed Obama – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Hostile regimes were replaced by friendlier ones to the US but the elusive peace and security, let alone democracy, never set in. Between 20,000 and 26,000 Iraqi military personnel were killed and 75,000 others were wounded, and there were at least 3,500 civilian fatalities from bombing. These cowardly attacks killed 2,977 innocent civilians and hundreds of first responders. Thousands of political dissidents have been executed while another tens of thousands continue to rot in Sisi’s neo-Pharaonic Egypt. Tens of thousands of unarmed civilians have been murdered in U.S. drone attacks in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
There was an earlier 9/11, namely the US-supported coup in Chile and the bombing of La Moneda on 11 September 1973. Their concerns are warranted, as many terrorism analysts and policymakers agree that despite trillions of dollars of investment in national security, the threat is as high as ever.
Obama’s strategy had its best success in May 2011, when U.S. special forces killed al qaeda leader Obama bin Laden, who masterminded the 9/11 attacks, at his home in Pakistan. The lessons from the September 11, 2001, attacks are still being absorbed, and depend as much on judging the decisions made in the aftermath.
The attacks 15 years ago began when the two hijacked planes hit and destroyed the Twin Towers. Twelve million Afghans are internally displaced, a figure that has doubled since 2013. Since the US-led coalition overthrew the Libyan government, the country has been in a state of chaos that enabled the spread of weapons to other conflict zones such as Syria, sent Libyan refugees to die at sea, and allowed ISIS to gain a foothold in Libya. But the USA has so far made little progress in combating the propaganda that draws sympathisers to ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Under the CIA’s “Operation Cyclone”, from 1979 to 1989, the United States and Saudi Arabia provided $40 billion worth of financial aid and weapons to nearly 100,000 Mujahidin and “Afghan Arabs” through Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence.
In some ways, however, the psychological damage caused both to the United States and the rest of the world has been even greater, and continues and has even possibly magnified. The list of terrorist leaders and fighters killed by America and our allies grows impressively longer. “So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors”. It was led by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who Lake said was considered too violent by bin Laden.
With Hillary Clinton, voters will get a more activist internationalism that would have intervened in Syria and remained in Iraq, but at the price of her corruption and mendacity. He noted that the war on terror is now entering its second generation, with a whole new crop of young people on both sides entering the fray.
After all, Osama bin Laden had said that one of his main aims was to lure American forces to wars in the Middle East so that they could bleed in the same way that Soviet forces had bled.
Joel Beinin, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Stanford University, was criticized for anti-American remarks when he simply said: “If Osama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the United States should bring him before an worldwide tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity”. “Either the USA policy of fighting terror is extremely counter-productive due to incompetence, or the real policy which is UN-stated one that uses terrorism to wage war in these states”. As Catherine the Great once said, “Cannons can not combat ideas”.
The only way to fight against them is to hold a dialogue, educate and enlighten the fanatics, and above all to hold fast to our principles.
The George Washington University Programme on Extremism counts 102 people charged in the U.S. with offences related to ISIS, many of them lured online. These threats can not be killed on a battlefield in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan. The ability to learn from such mistakes would be their only saving grace.
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Farhang Jahanpour, a TFF Associate and Board member and Fellow of The Royal Asiatic Society, is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Isfahan and a former Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University.
