On that nearly cloudless morning 25 years ago when terrorists hijacked four airplanes and launched the deadliest attack on America since Pearl Harbor, the country’s initial response was inspired and unifying. Firefighters and police officers climbed the stairs of burning buildings in the face of mortal risk. Passengers on a doomed jet stormed the cockpit and saved countless lives. Within weeks, the United States, with the world’s support, went to war against the attacks’ plotters and their protectors in Afghanistan.
America would claim some major successes. Al Qaeda, in its original form, was crushed, with almost every leader eventually killed or captured. There has been no terrorist attack against the United States since 2001 that approaches the death toll of that day — 2,977 — largely thanks to work by U.S. forces, intelligence agencies and law enforcement. In the days after Sept. 11, Americans wondered when they might again live without constant anxiety about terrorism. For years, most of us have done so without even realizing it.
Yet this recitation of post-Sept. 11 accomplishments masks a harder truth. The principal legacy of America’s response to that horrible day is not a stronger, more resilient nation. It is instead two long, bloody wars — one of which, in Iraq, was started on false pretenses — that mostly weakened the United States, at home and abroad. It is an America more isolated from the world.
More than 7,000 service members were killed and more than 53,000 wounded in the war on terror. By one estimate, it cost more than $8 trillion and 900,000 lives. It drained resources that could have been used to strengthen the country against emerging rivals. Some of the steepest costs are the hardest to measure: the damage to our social compact and our domestic politics. Many soldiers who answered the call to defend the country and fought in the misguided wars, along with their families and communities, understandably feel betrayed by their leaders.
On this 25th anniversary, we honor the victims of Sept. 11 and the veterans of the wars that followed. And we ask that America face the mistakes that it made and work to build a stronger nation. That work will not be easy. President Trump is compounding the errors that followed Sept. 11 with his own reckless war and far more damaging version of go-it-alone foreign policy. At the same time, artificial intelligence is making new kinds of attacks possible. Confronting today’s challenges will be easier if the nation grapples honestly with the past quarter-century.
For much of the period after the disaster of the Vietnam War, America adhered to its lessons. Go to war only with defined and achievable goals. Prevent “mission creep.” Most of all, win. Victory deters enemies, attracts allies and strengthens the confidence of citizens that the government can be trusted when it asks for sacrifice in pursuit of larger goals.
The shock of the Sept. 11 attacks reset America’s national security assessment. It was so traumatic that it seemed to call for different rules. It heralded a new kind of threat: Large-scale attacks against Americans no longer required the resources of a nation, such as an army or navy. Transnational networks of extremists could use the resources of globalization — transportation, communication, technology — to attack America. The Bush administration announced a sweeping response, what became known as the “global war on terror.” In doing so, it neglected some enduring lessons that remained as true as they had always been.
The first of the three big mistakes occurred in Afghanistan. The war against the Taliban and the Qaeda forces there was a justified and necessary response to the attacks. Within months, the U.S. military destroyed Al Qaeda’s camps (even if killing Osama bin Laden would take nearly a decade) and drove the Taliban from power. But President George W. Bush and his team then allowed themselves to engage in classic mission creep.
When the Taliban offered to surrender, cede control of the provinces they held and allow a new government to take power, the United States declined. American officials did so even though Hamid Karzai, who would soon become the country’s interim president, wanted to accept. They instead sought to hunt down Taliban fighters and leaders and rebuild Afghanistan from the ground up as a democratic society.
The effort would prove as doomed as the history of such efforts in Afghanistan and the Middle East suggested it would. The United States should have pursued narrower, achievable goals in Afghanistan and declared victory when it could have. Ultimately, the grand visions came to naught. In August 2021, almost 20 years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Taliban fully returned to power.
The second major mistake occurred in 2003, when the United States started an unnecessary war in Iraq. There, the long-running effort to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear, chemical and biological weapons morphed into a fear of terrorists doing even more damage than they had done on Sept. 11. The theory — preposterously thin in retrospect — was that Mr. Hussein would give these weapons to terrorists to use against America and its allies. “Iraq’s weapons of mass terror and the terror networks to which the Iraqi regime are linked are not two separate themes,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared in 2003. “They are part of the same threat.”
As it did with nation-building in Afghanistan, the trauma of Sept. 11 played a role in obscuring the foolishness of the plan. There was legitimate uncertainty before the war about whether Mr. Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But there was no solid evidence that he did, nor any sign that he was collaborating with Qaeda terrorists. The United States asked its soldiers to fight and die for a flimsy theory.
Iraq today is a better place than it was under Mr. Hussein’s sadistic regime, but the price has been steep. Tens of thousands of civilians died, and the war created a power vacuum that fueled sectarian conflict and spawned a new generation of terrorist groups, notably ISIS. Less quantifiable but no less real is the enduring damage to America’s reputation and to its ability to rally support for its foreign policy goals.
The third mistake was the betrayal of American values in the service of defeating terrorism. Abroad, the United States tortured prisoners, through beatings, humiliations, simulated drownings and more, and imprisoned people at Guantánamo Bay for years without charging them with a crime. At home, the government used broad new powers to track and monitor Americans and foreigners alike.
Any democracy must balance civil liberties and national security, and the choices can be difficult. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States was right to expand its surveillance capabilities to prevent future attacks, and it has succeeded at doing so partly because of that expansion. Yet the expansion clearly went too far.
The Fourth Amendment holds that the government must obtain a warrant to search citizens or their property without their consent. A post-Sept. 11 law, largely allowed by the courts, instead enabled government officials to sweep up many more communications with no warrant. Law enforcement can often monitor citizens’ phone calls, texts and emails, based on limited suspicion.
The most intrusive civil liberties encroachments were reserved for Muslims. Days after the attacks, Mr. Bush declared that America’s enemy was “a fringe form of Islamic extremism” and “not our many Muslim friends.” Nonetheless, law enforcement and the intelligence community used their new powers inappropriately against Muslims. Law enforcement officers spied on mosques and ran operations designed to entice congregants into plotting attacks.
In 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in Illinois on the perpetuation of America’s political institutions. Declaring that all the armies of the world “could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years,” he said the danger to American democracy was nonetheless real. “It cannot come from abroad,” the future president said, but rather, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
After Sept. 11, America’s leaders were right that the country was vulnerable to a new kind of foreign attack but wrong to break with our values and the lessons of past wars. Their actions are not the only reason America finds itself with an angry political culture, but they have contributed. Mr. Trump rode to power partly by criticizing the nation’s post-Sept. 11 response more harshly than any other prominent politician — only to repeat some of the mistakes himself, including through a self-defeating war of choice in Iran that suffers from mission creep.
Twenty-five years later, it is important to step back from today’s cynicism and remember the heroism and national unity in the hours and days after the attacks. That is the spirit that can help build a better path forward.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post How the Heroic Response to 9/11 Went Awry appeared first on New York Times.
