Today we commemorate the 16th anniversary of what Al-Qa’ida termed its Planes Operation, the most consequential terrorist attacks in history. That operation left 19 dead jihadists, 2,978 dead innocent victims, plus thousands of injured. Not to mention the World Trade Center complex annihilated, four jetliners destroyed, the Pentagon badly damaged, and a nation changed forever.
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With the passing of time we can see the Al-Qa’ida Planes Operation and its impacts with a clarity that was previously out of reach. In the months after 9/11, when shock turned to an outrage that birthed a national unity which proved as intense as it was fleeting, a new era dawned for America in a long-term struggle against Islamist terrorism and extremism. How has that conflict panned out over the last 16 years?
In the first place, it ought to be noted that our Intelligence Community has done a commendable job of keeping mass-casualty terrorism away from our shores since 9/11. In particular, FBI-NSA teamwork, in near-seamless collaboration with close foreign intelligence partners, has foiled hundreds of terrorist plots “left of boom” as they say in the spy trade. Jihadists have executed exactly zero “big wedding” attacks in the United States in the last 16 years—and it’s not for any lack of trying.
Indeed, since 9/11 the FBI-NSA counterterrorism partnership has grown so effective at stopping jihadists before they kill that civil libertarians routinely complain that many of these would-be terrorists are harmless ne’er-do-wells and fantasists entrapped by government informants. This is a by-product of the success of our domestic counterterrorism in recent years.
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The rise of that Islamic State, at the expense of Al-Qa’ida, is another by-product of our counterterrorism successes since 9/11. The global terrorist franchise that attacked our homeland spectacularly 16 years ago isn’t out, but it’s unquestionably down. Most of its superstars who helped plan and execute the Planes Operation are long dead or in custody.
Most famously, Osama Bin Laden himself was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs at his Pakistani safehouse in May 2011, after a near-decade of worldwide manhunting by our spies and commandos. Since then, his long-serving number-two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a man with an indisputably mysterious past, has had a tough time getting Al-Qa’ida back into the top tier of the jihadist game.
The leading architect of 9/11, the jihadist entrepreneur Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, has been in our custody since 2003 when he was arrested in—yet again—Pakistan. Although there remain important unanswered questions about KSM (as he’s known in counterterrorism circles), nobody powerful in Washington over the past 16 years has ever seemed eager to answer them. This is something of a pattern in our Federal bureaucracy, which displays odd incuriosity about unraveling the full dimensions of major terrorist attacks—whether they include jihadists or not.
Much of Al-Qa’ida’s energy and prestige in Islamist circles has been absorbed by the Islamic State—although that group, too, is under serious military pressure in Iraq and Syria, led by the United States. All that can be stated with certainty is that the Al-Qa’ida Planes Operation has never been replicated, which says something important about our counterterrorism efforts since 2001.
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Kicking the Taliban out of Kabul was a classic “punitive expedition” that was unwisely allowed to mission-creep itself into a long-term exercise in what we euphemistically (and inaccurately) term “nation-building.” In practice, this has amounted to attempting to make Afghanistan not Afghanistan, and it has panned out exactly like every other foreign effort to do so has for the last 2,300 years, when Alexander the Great had a crack at it. Nevertheless, President Donald Trump, who campaign strongly against our Middle Eastern misadventures, has proven unable to extricate our military from Afghanistan, now the longest war in America’s history by far. Our doomed campaign in that country has become a multi-generational effort that nobody in Washington seems to have any clue how to get out of.
Our invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was less moral and even less wise. Indeed, sage strategists were cautioning against such a move before it happened, to no avail. While there can be no denying that Saddam Hussein was an awful despot with enormous blood on his hands, all that evicting him from power accomplished was handing Iraq over to surrogates of Iran, which guaranteed decades of multi-sided civil war. This, too, was easily predictable – and was predicted by some in our Intelligence Community before the Iraq invasion kicked off – but nobody listened. Reality cut no ice in the heady post-9/11 spirit of waging aggressive war in the Middle East to magically solve our jihadist problem.
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Then there’s the all-important matter of nuclear proliferation. Every dictator on earth got the clear message in 2003 that if you don’t possess weapons of mass destruction, Washington may decide to regime-change you at America’s whim. What you really don’t want to be is Saddam Hussein, who managed to convince his enemies that he had WMDs—when he actually didn’t.
As if that lesson weren’t already indelibly clear, the ignominious downfall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, at the hands of NATO-backed rebels in his native Libya, added detail. Having watched Saddam’s downfall, the once-rogue dictator opted to get on the right side of Washington in late 2003, giving up his WMD program and quietly cooperating in America’s war against jihadism.
He kept his word, played by Washington’s rules, and assisted in our fight against Al-Qa’ida, though this did Gaddafi no good when he faced a rebellion, which NATO assisted with airstrikes and military aid. Gaddafi ended his life in a sewage ditch, taunted by rebels who shot him in the head while sodomizing him. Nobody got the message here—that America doesn’t keep its word so never, ever give up your WMDs—more clearly than North Korea, which found itself placed in George W. Bush’s absurd “Axis of Evil” a few months after the Planes Operation. We are currently engaged in alarming nuclear brinkmanship with Pyongyang, which is determined to not repeat the strategic mistakes of Saddam’s Iraq or Gaddafi’s Libya. It should be no surprise that North Korea has zero interest in parley with America regarding its nuclear weapons. This daunting geopolitical crisis may be the most important legacy of 9/11.
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Our scary nuclear crisis with North Korea is one of the many legacies of 9/11….as I explain here:https://t.co/jbT6mlfkLU
— John Schindler (@20committee) September 11, 2017
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