12.9 — After 2001

On 11 September 2001, nineteen men hijacked four aircraft. Two were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York, one into the Pentagon, and one crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers, who had learned by phone what was happening elsewhere, attempted to retake it.

Around 2,977 people were killed.

The operation cost, by the 9/11 Commission's estimate, somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 dollars.

The response cost, by the Costs of War project at Brown University, something in the region of eight trillion dollars and produced somewhere between 900,000 and 940,000 direct deaths from violence across the war zones, with several times that number of indirect deaths from the destruction of health systems, water and food security.

That ratio is the subject of this chapter.

Al-Qaeda

Its origins are in Chapter 12.4. The Afghan war against the Soviet Union drew foreign volunteers, funded and organised through Pakistani intelligence with American and Saudi money. Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi, was among the organisers of that flow.

The direct American role in funding bin Laden himself is disputed and probably overstated; the environment that produced the network was created by that war, which is not disputed.

Al-Qaeda formed around 1988. Its stated grievances, in bin Laden's own declarations, were the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Gulf War, American support for Israel, and sanctions on Iraq.

Its strategy, stated explicitly in its own documents, was to provoke. The reasoning: a spectacular attack would draw the United States into a ground war in a Muslim country, where it would be bled as the Soviet Union had been, and its conduct would radicalise populations and delegitimise allied governments.

That strategy should be kept in view when assessing the response, because it worked substantially as designed.

Afghanistan

The invasion began in October 2001 after the Taliban government refused to hand over bin Laden without evidence.

The initial campaign was fast — American air power and special forces with the Northern Alliance, an existing Afghan opposition, removed the Taliban from the cities within weeks.

And bin Laden escaped at Tora Bora in December 2001, when the ground operation relied on local militias and Pakistani forces to seal the border rather than on American troops.

What followed was twenty years.

The mission expanded from removing a regime to building a state — elections, a constitution, an army, schools, a police force.

What was achieved is real. Girls' school enrolment rose from near zero to millions. Life expectancy and child mortality improved substantially. A generation of urban Afghans grew up with media, universities and professional careers.

And what failed. The Afghan government was corrupt and its legitimacy never extended far into the countryside. The Afghan army was built on an American model requiring air support, contractor maintenance and logistics it could not sustain alone. The Taliban's leadership operated from Pakistani territory throughout — a fact acknowledged repeatedly by American officials — which meant the insurgency had a sanctuary and Chapter 10.4's Spanish lesson applied.

And the money. Enormous sums flowed into a small economy, which produced corruption on a scale that undermined the government being built. The Special Inspector General's reports document it in detail.

The withdrawal in August 2021 was followed by the collapse of the Afghan government and army within days and the Taliban's return.

The position of Afghan women since is the sharpest indictment of the whole enterprise: secondary education for girls prohibited, employment restricted, and movement limited.

Iraq

The invasion in March 2003 was justified on two claims.

That Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

And that it had links to al-Qaeda.

Neither was true, and the assessment of how that happened is documented.

No stockpiles were found. The Iraq Survey Group concluded in 2004 that Iraq had destroyed its stockpiles in the 1990s and had retained an intention to reconstitute capability if sanctions ended, which is a substantially different claim from the one made.

Britain's Chilcot Inquiry, reporting in 2016, found that the judgements about the threat were presented with a certainty that was not justified, that the legal basis was far from satisfactory, that military action was not a last resort, and that the planning for the aftermath was wholly inadequate.

The claimed al-Qaeda link was assessed as not supported by intelligence at the time.

And the aftermath is where the largest failures were.

De-Ba'athification removed party members from public employment, which in a one-party state meant teachers, engineers and administrators.

The dissolution of the Iraqi army in May 2003 put several hundred thousand armed, trained, unemployed men onto the street with their weapons and a grievance.

Both decisions are widely identified by military and civilian analysts as the proximate causes of the insurgency.

What followed. An insurgency, then a sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia communities that had lived together in mixed cities. Iraqi civilian deaths from violence are estimated by Iraq Body Count at over 200,000 documented, with survey-based estimates considerably higher.

Abu Ghraib, where photographs published in 2004 documented abuse and humiliation of prisoners by American personnel, did enormous damage to the stated purpose of the war.

And ISIS grew directly from it. Its predecessor organisation was formed in the Iraqi insurgency; its leadership included former Iraqi army officers dismissed in 2003; and it expanded into the vacuum of the Syrian civil war, declaring a caliphate in 2014 and controlling territory across both countries. Its conduct — mass executions, the enslavement of Yazidi women, and the destruction of archaeological sites — was documented by its own propaganda. It was defeated territorially by 2019 by a combination of Iraqi forces, Kurdish forces, an international coalition, and Iranian-backed militias.

The surveillance state

The other consequence, and it is the one with the longest reach.

The USA PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001, expanded surveillance powers substantially.

And the scale of what was built became public in 2013, when Edward Snowden, a contractor, disclosed documents describing bulk collection of telephone metadata on American citizens, programmes obtaining data from major technology companies, and the tapping of internet backbone traffic including of allied governments' communications.

Legal consequences followed. An American appeals court found in 2015 that the bulk telephone metadata programme had not been authorised by the statute relied on. The Investigatory Powers Act in Britain and equivalent legislation elsewhere placed similar activity on a statutory footing with oversight.

And the general point is the one worth carrying. The capabilities built in an emergency do not get dismantled when the emergency passes. The legal architecture, the agencies and the technical infrastructure are permanent, and the argument about them is now about oversight rather than existence.

Guantánamo Bay was opened in 2002 to hold detainees outside the jurisdiction of American courts. Around 780 people have been held there; a small number remain, several never charged. Enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, were authorised in legal memoranda; the Senate Intelligence Committee's 2014 report concluded the techniques were not effective in producing intelligence and that their effectiveness had been misrepresented internally.

And extraordinary rendition transferred detainees to countries where torture was expected, with the cooperation of a number of European governments, documented in subsequent European parliamentary and court proceedings.

The accounting

Around 900,000 to 940,000 people killed directly by violence in the post-2001 war zones, including combatants on all sides and around 400,000 civilians, on the Costs of War project's figures.

Around 38 million people displaced.

Around eight trillion dollars in United States budgetary costs and obligations, including future veterans' care.

Around 7,000 American service deaths and over 30,000 suicides among post-9/11 veterans, which is a figure that exceeds combat deaths several times over.

And the strategic assessment. Al-Qaeda's central organisation was substantially degraded and bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in 2011. And jihadist movements are present in more countries than in 2001, and the two states invaded are, on most measures, in worse condition.

The most-cited internal assessment is a memo written by Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 asking whether the United States was capturing, killing or deterring more terrorists every day than the madrassas and radical clerics were recruiting and deploying against it. The question was never satisfactorily answered.

India's experience

India has faced sustained terrorism over the same period and its response has differed (Chapter 6.26).

The 2001 attack on Parliament produced a ten-month military standoff with Pakistan. The 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which ten gunmen killed 166 people over three days, did not produce a military response.

The restraint in 2008 was widely debated in India and was, by most analyses, a decision that a conventional retaliation between two nuclear-armed states carried unacceptable escalation risk (Chapter 6.26's stability-instability paradox).

The policy changed after 2016 and 2019, with declared cross-border strikes.

And India's domestic experience includes the Punjab insurgency of the 1980s, the Kashmir insurgency from 1989, the northeastern insurgencies, and the Maoist insurgency in central India — each with its own causes and each involving the same tension between security measures and civil liberties that the rest of this chapter describes.

Where this shows up in your life

Airport security, which is the most visible daily inheritance and whose effectiveness is genuinely debated by security researchers.

Data retention, communications interception and the legal frameworks around them in most democracies.

And the general lesson, which Chapter 16.1 states as a pattern. A shocking event produces a demand for action, and the actions taken in the following months are frequently more consequential than the event. The 2003 invasion, the interrogation policy and the surveillance architecture were all decided within about eighteen months of an attack that lasted 102 minutes.

What the next page covers

Chapter 12.10 closes this Part with the map as it stands — the great power competition now underway, the specific flashpoints and what makes each dangerous, the chokepoints of Chapter 1.12 in their current form, the technology and resource competitions, the Qatar story as an illustration of how a very small state acquires influence, and India's position in all of it.