On the morning of 11 September 2001, nineteen men boarded four commercial aircraft on the east coast of the United States and turned them into weapons. By the time the day was over, nearly 3,000 people were dead, two of the most recognisable buildings in the world had collapsed, and the most powerful government on earth had begun the process of deciding what it would do in response. The decisions it made over the following months and years — the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the detention regime at Guantanamo Bay, the global surveillance architecture, the drone warfare programme — reshaped the world in ways that are still being reckoned with, and that bear an increasingly complicated relationship to the stated goals of the enterprise.
Al-Qaeda, the organisation that planned and executed the attacks, had been founded in the late 1980s by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi construction heir who had gone to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet occupation and emerged from that experience with a particular vision of transnational jihad. The organisation’s strategic logic was never simply the destruction of American lives, though it was certainly that; it was the provocation of an American response so disproportionate that it would radicalise Muslims across the world, destabilise the corrupt Arab regimes that American power sustained, and ultimately produce the conditions for an Islamic caliphate. The degree to which that strategic vision was actually achieved is one of the more uncomfortable questions of the post-September 11 era.
The Bush Doctrine and Its Logic
The American political response to the attacks was shaped by forces that predated them. The administration of George W. Bush had arrived in office with a foreign policy team — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others associated with the neoconservative movement — that had been developing a set of ideas about American power and its use since the end of the Cold War. The central argument of neoconservatism, as it had crystallised in the 1990s, was that American military supremacy was an asset that was being wasted by timidity: that the United States should be willing to use force to reshape the world in its interests and in accordance with its values, and that the reluctance of the Clinton years to commit American power to decisive action had created the conditions for the rise of threats like al-Qaeda.
September 11 provided both the justification and the political opportunity. The Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress three days after the attacks with only one dissenting vote, gave the president effectively unlimited authority to use force against any nation, organisation, or person he determined had planned, authorised, committed, or aided the attacks. The Patriot Act, signed six weeks later, vastly expanded domestic surveillance powers with minimal legislative scrutiny. The Bush Doctrine, as it emerged from a series of speeches and policy documents in the following months, articulated a set of principles that broke with the frameworks of the previous half-century: the United States reserved the right to take pre-emptive military action against threats before they materialised; it would treat nations that harboured terrorists as equivalent to the terrorists themselves; it would act unilaterally if necessary, without the authorisation of the United Nations or the support of allies.
Afghanistan: The First War
The invasion of Afghanistan, which began in October 2001, had the most direct connection to the September 11 attacks. Al-Qaeda had planned and launched the attacks from Afghan territory with the protection of the Taliban government, and the campaign to topple the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda’s Afghan infrastructure was swift: American airpower combined with the Northern Alliance brought down the Taliban government within weeks. What followed was a twenty-year project of nation-building that the Bush administration had initially dismissed as an inappropriate use of American military power. The international community, operating through NATO and under a UN mandate, committed itself to constructing a functioning Afghan state: a constitution, a parliament, a police force, an army, schools for girls, roads, clinics. The Taliban, expelled from Kabul, reorganised in the borderlands and launched an insurgency that ground slowly through the following years, gaining in intensity as the Afghan government proved incapable of providing the security and basic services that might have given ordinary Afghans a reason to support it.
The fundamental problem was that the Afghan state being constructed was artificial in a specific sense: its survival depended not on organic political and institutional development but on the continuous presence of foreign troops and the continuous flow of foreign money. When the United States finally withdrew in August 2021, the Afghan army that two decades of American investment had trained and equipped collapsed within days, and the Taliban returned to Kabul within a fortnight of the American departure. The images of desperate Afghans clinging to the outside of departing aircraft at Kabul airport were the visual summary of what the intervention had achieved.
Iraq: The Chosen War
The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was a different kind of conflict: not a response to a direct connection between Iraq and the September 11 attacks — no credible evidence of such a connection was ever established — but an expression of the broader Bush Doctrine’s logic that the United States should reshape the Middle East by force. The public case for invasion rested primarily on the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003 — in which the Secretary of State laid out the intelligence case for Iraqi WMD programmes — was subsequently revealed to have been based on assessments that the administration knew to be contested, exaggerated, and in significant respects fabricated. No weapons of mass destruction were found after the invasion.
The war itself was brief: American and British forces reached Baghdad in less than three weeks, and Bush declared major combat operations over on 1 May 2003 beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished.” What followed was neither mission nor accomplishment. The dissolution of the Iraqi army and the de-Baathification programme, carried out by the Coalition Provisional Authority, created an instant insurgency by putting several hundred thousand armed men out of work and excluding the experienced administrators who might have maintained basic state functions. The looting of Baghdad’s museums, ministries, and infrastructure in the days after the fall of Saddam’s government, which American forces did not attempt to prevent, was the visible beginning of the state’s dissolution.
Torture, Detention, and the Rule of Law
The legal architecture that the Bush administration constructed to manage the War on Terror represented a deliberate effort to place the conduct of the war outside the frameworks of domestic and international law that had been developed over the preceding half-century. The designation of captured fighters as “enemy combatants” rather than prisoners of war removed them from the protections of the Geneva Conventions. The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was explicitly designed to be outside the jurisdiction of American courts. At its peak it held approximately 780 detainees; the large majority were eventually released without charge. Fewer than a dozen were ever convicted of anything by the military commissions established to try them.
The “enhanced interrogation techniques” authorised by the Bush administration’s Justice Department — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, confinement in small spaces — were torture by any definition that the word had previously carried, a fact that the administration’s lawyers went to extraordinary lengths to deny. The Abu Ghraib scandal, which broke in April 2004 when photographs of American soldiers humiliating and abusing Iraqi detainees were published, demonstrated that the culture of impunity constructed at the top of the chain of command had spread through it. The soldiers in the photographs were prosecuted; the officials who had created the conditions for what they did were not. The revelation of the NSA’s mass surveillance programme by Edward Snowden in 2013 disclosed that the domestic surveillance architecture erected after September 11 had grown into a system of comprehensive warrantless collection of Americans’ phone records and internet communications that had no credible legal basis and no democratic accountability.
The Long Insurgency
Iraq descended into sectarian civil war in 2006, after the bombing of the al-Askari mosque in Samarra by al-Qaeda in Iraq, an organisation that had not existed before the American invasion. The fighting between Shia militias and Sunni insurgents in 2006 and 2007 produced levels of violence that dwarfed the original invasion: thousands of civilians killed monthly, mass displacement, the ethnic cleansing of mixed neighbourhoods in Baghdad. The “surge” of American troops ordered by Bush in January 2007, combined with a turn in Sunni tribal politics that led many former insurgents to accept American support against al-Qaeda in Iraq, reduced the violence substantially by 2008. But the underlying political conditions — a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad that systematically excluded Sunnis from power and resources — remained unresolved.
The withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq at the end of 2011 left a country with a functioning government in name only. The marginalisation of Iraq’s Sunni population under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki created exactly the conditions in which the successor organisation to al-Qaeda in Iraq — the Islamic State, ISIS — could recruit, organise, and in June 2014 seize Mosul, Iraq’s second city. The Islamic State’s declaration of a caliphate in June 2014 was the direct consequence of the political vacuum the American invasion had created and then failed to fill.
Obama and the Continuation
Barack Obama was elected in 2008 on a platform that included sharp criticism of the Iraq War and a commitment to closing Guantanamo Bay and restoring American standing in the world. He fulfilled some of these commitments. Enhanced interrogation was prohibited by executive order. The killing of Osama bin Laden by US Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011 was the most significant single achievement of the entire post-September 11 military effort. What Obama did not do was dismantle the War on Terror’s institutional architecture. Guantanamo Bay remained open, defeated by Congressional opposition. The drone warfare programme — significantly expanded under Obama — killed thousands of suspected militants in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere under rules of engagement that were classified, subject to no judicial oversight, and generated significant civilian casualties. The kill list — a regularly updated catalogue of individuals whom the administration had authorised to be killed on the basis of secret intelligence assessments — was a form of executive assassination that had no legal precedent in American history.
The Legacy
The costs of the post-September 11 wars are almost too large to be rendered as numbers. The Watson Institute at Brown University estimated that the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria had cost the United States approximately $8 trillion by 2021, including the long-term costs of caring for veterans. Estimates of civilian deaths across the conflict zones run from several hundred thousand to over a million. More than 7,000 American military personnel died in the two main war zones. The strategic balance sheet is no less grim. The September 11 attacks killed 2,977 people; the response to them killed many times that number, destabilised multiple countries, generated a refugee crisis whose consequences were felt across Europe, and produced the Islamic State as a direct consequence of the political vacuum the Iraq invasion created.
Al-Qaeda itself survived, dispersed and degraded but capable of inspiring and directing attacks across the world. The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan as if the twenty-year American presence had never occurred. The Iranian government, designated part of the Axis of Evil in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union, emerged from the Iraq War with its regional influence dramatically expanded, since the invasion had destroyed the Sunni state that had been Iran’s primary counterweight. The political culture of fear that the War on Terror generated, refreshed by each new attack in Western cities, produced immigration policies, surveillance systems, and political movements that reshaped the democracies of the Western world. The Muslim communities of Europe and North America experienced a sustained period of discriminatory scrutiny whose effects on social cohesion were, at best, counterproductive.
The nineteen men who boarded those aircraft in September 2001 wanted to provoke a war. They succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation.
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