The 9/11 legacy: how the War on Terror was lost

At 9.32am on July 5 2005, the US Senate committee on foreign relations, meeting in Room SD-419 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, heard an intriguing story about SA.

Just five of the 18 members of the prestigious committee were present that day. The meeting had been called to discuss the threat of terrorist penetration of the US through the border with Mexico. In 2004 alone, 1.1-million people had been arrested trying to cross the 3,200km border. A million of them were Mexicans seeking a better life; the rest were what the department of homeland security referred to as "OTMs — other than Mexicans".

The committee chair, Indiana’s Richard G Lugar, said about 4,000 of these individuals were from "from so-called countries of interest, like Somalia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, which have produced or been associated with terrorist cells".

In the sweltering summer heat (it was 27°C at 9.30am, rising to 32°C by lunch time), Lugar told the audience and his four colleagues — two of whom, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, would rise to much higher office — a story that was to have a profound effect on SA and would bring the country, like the rest of the world, directly into the orbit of what would become the War on Terror.

"In July 2004," Lugar said, "a Pakistani woman swam across the Rio Grande River from Mexico to Texas. She was detained when she tried to board a plane to New York with $6,000 in cash and a severely altered SA passport. Her husband’s name was found to be on the US’s terrorist watch list. She was convicted on immigration charges and deported in 2004."

Weeks after that senate committee meeting, Barry Gilder, SA’s then director-general of home affairs, confirmed that SA passports were popping up in high-profile terror cases in places including Germany, Malaysia, Indonesia, Zambia, Britain and Pakistan.

In one case, the four suicide bombers responsible for the 7/7 bombings in London called Haroon Rashid Aswat 20 times on his SA cellphone. He was a UK citizen who had lived in Joburg for five months and possessed an SA passport. "Boxes" of SA passports were being found in capitals across the globe.

The situation was so dire that in 2008 the UK decided to stop the visa-free travel to that country that South Africans had previously enjoyed.

SA had, like virtually every jurisdiction in the world, become ensnared in the War on Terror, the US-led global military and political effort that cost trillions of dollars, shackled and defined four American presidencies, touched almost every part of the globe, upended international travel, collapsed and rebuilt cities and landscapes, and had seen the world’s major military power succumb to the inevitability that it could not rebuild a failed state and establish a Western-style democracy in Afghanistan.

On August 30, after nearly 20 years of war, the last US soldier left Kabul’s international airport, to the sound of the triumphant Taliban’s guns piercing the night air.

Just 20 years ago the US began to put in motion the plan to chase the Taliban out of Afghanistan; 20 years later the tables were turned.

Under the guise of the War on Terror, US and British leaders had lied about Iraq possessing "weapons of mass destruction" so they could go to war against Saddam Hussein. US troops and agents had used torture, detention and "renditions" to allegedly get to the truth about terrorism. There was a litany of other episodes that left the world wondering who the good guys were.

Now, as the world looks back at 9/11, the story of those 20 years reads like a morality tale. Those who stood for the ideals of freedom went out to defend these lofty positions and found themselves becoming like their enemies: they killed, they tortured, they lied and they deceived.

Last week, a new Pew Research Center survey said 69% of US adults believe their country mostly failed to achieve its goals in Afghanistan.

The longest war the US has ever fought has all been in vain. It has not made the world a safer place.

In the beginning

For many, the War on Terror began at 8.46am on September 11 2001, when American Airlines Flight 11, travelling from Boston to Los Angeles, struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

Then new images flashed across the globe as the horror of that first strike repeated itself on news channels within the next two hours: a second passenger jet struck the second of the twin towers, another struck the Pentagon in Washington, and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

The unthinkable had happened. The US was under terrorist attack on home soil.

In fact, the attack had started two days before, on September 9, when members of a militant Sunni Islamist terrorist group called Al-Qaeda, posing as journalists, assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the resistance leader who had stood against the Soviet Union occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and again resisted the reactionary, backward-looking Taliban when it claimed power in the 1990s.

In total, 2,977 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

The mastermind, Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, became the world’s most wanted man.

For people of a certain generation there is no need to explain what 9/11 was; it is imprinted on our minds. Yet we forget that these events took place 20 years ago and are now history. Consider, for example, that of the 13 US service members who were killed in an attack on Kabul’s airport during the US withdrawal in August, five were only 20 years old. "Seven of the service members were toddlers or infants in 2001, and the oldest was 11," New York magazine reported.

"Meanwhile, a retaliatory US drone strike reportedly killed seven Afghan children, including two two-year-olds who had no inkling of 9/11, let alone the war that has been waged in its name."

Yet, 20 years ago the twin towers were among the most recognisable symbols of US financial and military power. To see them collapse in a cloud of fire and smoke was a potent message. The perpetrators understood not just war, but the usefulness of spectacle and propaganda in war.

So when then president George W Bush addressed the US nine days after the attack and declared a global War on Terror, he was applauded.

"Our War on Terror begins with Al-Qaeda, but it does not end there," said Bush. "It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."

The unpopular Bush, just nine months into his tenure and the butt of jokes over his verbal gaffes, saw his job approval rise 35 percentage points in the space of three weeks. Eighty-six percent of adults approved of the way he was handling his job.

America was deeply hurt and patriotic fervour was at heights unseen in decades. This made weaponising nationalism easy, and the country changed overnight.

Every aspect of society became focused on security and on retaliating against those who had mounted the attacks. A new department of homeland security, bringing together 22 governmental agencies, including customs, immigration, emergency management and others, was formed. Colour-coded terror alerts, announced every day under the homeland security advisory system, were introduced and became part of daily life, as ubiquitous as the weather.

Just as SA today wonders how intelligence agencies failed to identify or anticipate the July 2021 riots, in which 340 South Africans died, Americans had to face the reality that 19 Al-Qaeda hijackers had trained at US flight schools, nonchalantly boarded four commercial aircraft, and forced their way into their cockpits to target a military installation and symbols of American capital and power.

This was a huge intelligence failure.

The result was the formation of a new travel security superstructure in the US — the transportation security authority — and the introduction of what have now become normal aspects of air travel everywhere in the world: screening, removal of shoes, official identity documents and so much else pertaining to security at airports and on flights.

These protocols have become ubiquitous in nearly every country. After 9/11, we all took our cue from America’s reaction.

Just six weeks after the attacks the Patriot Act was passed, giving US intelligence agencies powers to search anything from your internet browser history to your home, with little judicial oversight. Further legislation in 2008 allowed for the tapping of phone calls, text messages and e-mails.

One should not blame US leaders alone for what the War on Terror became. The Pew Center’s researchers point out that in the days following the 9/11 attacks "majorities favoured a requirement that all citizens carry national ID cards, allowing the CIA to contract with criminals in pursuing suspected terrorists and permitting the CIA to conduct assassinations overseas when pursuing suspected terrorists".

The press and many civil society bodies joined the chorus for war.

The war

After the Taliban refused to hand over Bin Laden, Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom against Afghanistan and, within weeks, had managed to overthrow its government.

In 2003, possibly the greatest outrage of the War on Terror unfolded, when Bush — accompanied by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair — claimed Iraq had failed to take a "final opportunity" to disarm itself of alleged nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that were "an immediate and intolerable threat to world peace".

They claimed, despite opposition from France, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and many others, that Iraq possessed "weapons of mass destruction" and was about to launch them.

Without evidence, they attacked Iraq and toppled Saddam.

(Look, Saddam was a nasty piece of work. Yet on the charges of weapons of mass destruction and aiding Al-Qaeda, there was nothing on the man.)

A year later Archbishop Desmond Tutu said: "An immoral war was thus waged, and the world is a great deal less safe place than before."

The money, the money

War is an expensive business, and a 20-year war is even more punishing.

Last week, Brown University’s Costs of War Project said the War on Terror had killed nearly a million people since 9/11: 387,000 civilians, 207,000 members of national military and police forces, 301,000 opposition fighters killed by US-led coalition troops and their allies, 15,000 US military service members, and another 15,000 allied Western troops, plus several hundred journalists and humanitarian aid workers.

The financial losses from the 9/11 terror attacks were huge, with the plunge in the stock market causing a $1.4-trillion loss in market value. Airlines and insurers, who paid out billions of dollars in claims, were some of the businesses that were hit hardest. And it has not stopped.

The Costs of War report says up to $8-trillion has been spent on the War on Terror since then, including $2.3-trillion spent by the US government on military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, $2.1-trillion in Iraq and Syria, and $355bn in Somalia and other regions of Africa.

An additional $1.1-trillion has been spent on domestic security measures in the US since 2001, bringing direct expenditures from the War on Terror at home and abroad to $5.8-trillion.

A safer, but fearful, America

There is no doubt that the US has largely succeeded in foiling terror attacks in the country, even if wars and insurrections linked to the Al-Qaeda philosophy have flourished elsewhere.

There has been only one case of a jihadist foreign terrorist organisation directing a deadly attack inside the country since 9/11. In 2019, Mohammed Al-Shamrani shot and killed three people at a naval air station in Florida at the instruction of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate of Bin Laden’s group. In all, jihadists without links to organised groups have killed 107 people inside the US.

On the other hand, deaths from far-Right terrorism number 114 in the same period.

The US is a country on perpetual alert. In August the department of homeland security warned of a "heightened threat environment" this month.

"The 20th anniversary of the September 11 2001 attacks, as well [as] religious holidays we assess could serve as a catalyst for acts of targeted violence," the agency said.

The end of the ‘forever wars’

After the Bush presidency and the Blair prime ministership came to an end, Obama — who had won the presidency in 2008 on the basis of getting out of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — vowed to wind down the campaign and bring US troops home.

That turned out to be easier said than done. In the first month of his presidency in 2009, Obama increased the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan to about 68,000. By December it was 100,000.

Throughout his presidency, Obama’s successor Donald Trump spoke about "America first" and about leaving the sites of what he called "the forever wars". He had not withdrawn when he was rejected by voters last November, though he had signed a peace deal with the Taliban.

Enter Biden, who vowed to finish the job, saying: "The US should not, and will not, engage in ‘forever wars’ that have cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars."

Last month’s shambolic withdrawal was the result. The Taliban, after 20 years in the wilderness, is now in charge of the country and is going about enforcing its rules. Women cower in their homes or, as happened last weekend, they go out and march for their rights and are assaulted by Taliban guards.

The war was just a hiatus for the Taliban. Now, 20 years later, it’s back to business as usual.

As for Biden: his administration, even as it has now left Afghanistan, is worried that Al-Qaeda may still pose a strategic threat.

A senior Biden official said in a briefing to journalists this year that "in 2021, the terrorist threat that we face is real and it emanates from a number of countries — indeed a number of continents — from Yemen, from Syria, from Somalia, from other parts of Africa. And we have to focus on those aspects of a dispersed and distributed terrorist threat, even as we keep our eye on the ball to prevent the re-emergence of a significant terrorist threat from Afghanistan through these repositioned counterterrorism capabilities."

It’s not just the US, of course, that is vulnerable.

In July this year SA approved the deployment of 1,495 troops to Mozambique to help fight jihadists in the gas-rich Cabo Delgado province in the north. Over the past four years, young men there, sometimes carrying the black flag of the Islamic State, have attacked villages and beheaded and mutilated citizens, including children.

Many fear that the area could become the next frontier for global jihadism in Africa.

It is not the only place in Africa where global jihadi terrorist groups thrive. In Mali, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and northeast Nigeria franchises of global jihadi movements such the Islamic State group and Al-Qaeda are doing well.

The US decision to leave Afghanistan does not make the security threat disappear. Indeed, this strategy can compound the problem rather than solve it. So what has been the point of it all?

When I arrived in New York in 2001 as the SA Sunday Times’s reporter, the enthusiasm for war was high. The US was wounded and its people wanted to feel safe.

The decision to go after Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was easy — and justified.

Yet by 2003, when the attack on Iraq was being debated and executed, the campaign was beginning to lose its way. Evidence for Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction was nonexistent. That, coupled with the fact that the reason for the US presence in Afghanistan was unclear after Al-Qaeda had been rooted out, made for a toxic environment.

The US was trying to build a new nation in Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union had been driven out in 1992, and its local proxy kicked out by the Taliban in the late 1990s. But it had no understanding of the country, or of the support its proxies had. The Taliban merely had to cling on and outlast it — which is exactly what has transpired.

The War on Terror was supposed to be fast and furious. That did not happen. It was supposed to birth a new Afghanistan. That did not happen. Instead, a renewed refugee crisis may be looming. And who is to say what a reborn Taliban will do next?

It is easy to point fingers at the US, but the truth is that, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, 9/11 changed us all. Whatever the blowback may be from this reconfigured post-Afghan era, the international community should not expect the US to solve the world’s problems on its own — or expect that the rest of us will remain untouched by whatever action it takes.

The whole world needs to act.