Twenty-five years after the deadliest terrorist attack in history and 25 years after the start of the War on Terror, “the world is a less safe place, despite our actions,” Iraq veteran Jocelyn Joseph said on the Hill.
Military interventions since 9/11 have killed more than 900,000 people and cost the United States more than $8 trillion (£5.9 trillion), according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. “Afghanistan and Iraq ended in failure,” said David Brady of The American Conservative, while “most Americans believe the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East were a mistake.” Indeed, this was the bulk of Donald Trump’s original appeal: “They lied,” he said of the architects of the 2016 War on Terror.
But while “there is much to criticize about the war on terrorism,” Douglas J. Feith declared in The Washington Post, in regard to its main goal, “the success has been astonishing.” There was no second September 11th. “Terrorists did not blow up skyscrapers, stadiums and power plants across the country” and “they did not turn America into a police state.”
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“Didn’t Osama bin Laden get everything he wanted?” asked Brady of The American Conservative. The financial cost “has brought undeniable economic harm, creating unprecedented levels of debt,” while “the human cost has hurt many Americans, not just the wars in the Middle East, but the elites who got us into them.” Syria is even “run by a former al-Qaeda member who was welcomed into the White House.”
But “the most costly event for the US would be another successful major attack,” said The Guardian’s Jason Burke. The fact that this never happened is “an undeniable success of US post-9/11 policy and a major failure of al-Qaeda.” And despite the obvious economic problems in the United States, “no one can argue that the country suffered the fate of the USSR.”
Meanwhile, the terrorist group led by Bin Laden faces questions about whether it can replace its aging fighters. While this is entirely possible, al-Qaeda as a brand is “noticeably declining,” terrorism expert Behnam Heidenreuther-Said, head of the Hamburg Police Academy’s Strategic Police Research Center, told Deutsche Welle. In Europe in particular, militant jihadism has become less attractive.
Some analysts are “summarizing the perceived strength of groups in Somalia or Mali that have very weak historical ties to al-Qaeda, and warning that their total number exceeds that of those loyal to Bin Laden in 2001,” said The Guardian’s Burke. However, “these several thousand young men with AK-47s have little in common with the organization that Bin Laden led 25 years ago, both in goals and capabilities.” The fact that al-Qaeda “still exists is something of an achievement for the group and, posthumously, for its founder.” But “this should not be called some kind of victory.”
What’s next?
A key lesson from 9/11 is that “threats increase when adversaries conclude America lacks the will, capability or resilience to defend itself,” said The Washington Post’s Feith.
But America and the West are under attack again, this time “from the Cold War enemy” Russia, “which watched as the US and its allies wasted lakes of blood and trillions in treasure weakening themselves after 9/11,” said The Independent’s international affairs editor Sam Kiely.
The West is now “spiritually and politically impoverished, deeply indebted, and unable to meet new defense needs and therefore vulnerable.” Vladimir Putin “should thank Bin Laden for this.”
