https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/09/13/counter-terrorism-since-9-11/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_
Criminals or combatants?
The debacle in Afghanistan returns the United States to our pre-9/11 threat environment. In fact, the threats are arguably worse. It would be an overstatement, though, to conclude that we are back to the state of vulnerability that obtained on September 10, 2001. Our counter-terrorism is markedly superior today. That is cause for guarded optimism but not overconfidence. In many ways, it is a reflection of how bad things were prior to 9/11. While national security has dramatically improved since then, there is serious backsliding.
Let’s be precise about why we undertook the effort that has now unspooled into a disaster. When American armed forces were dispatched to Afghanistan in October 2001, the essential mission was threefold. The oft-forgotten first part was to shift the U.S. counter-terrorism paradigm from a law-enforcement model to a war footing.
Second, and most obvious, was to rout al-Qaeda, which had conducted the 9/11 atrocities. From the terror network’s hub, particularly in the Afghan–Pakistani border region (though it had strongholds throughout the country), al-Qaeda orchestrated the attacks in which nearly 3,000 Americans were killed. In nearly simultaneous suicide-hijacking strikes, a total of 19 trained jihadists destroyed the iconic World Trade Center and badly damaged a section of the Pentagon; another plane they’d seized, Flight 93, crash-landed near Shanksville, Pa., thanks to the extraordinary valor of the doomed passengers and crew, rather than plowing into the U.S. Capitol or the White House as jihadists are believed to have intended.
The third mission, the most enduring and thus the most difficult, was to ensure that the terror network was denied sanctuary and state sponsorship, which in Afghanistan had evolved into active military alliance with a like-minded regime, the Taliban.
The 9/11 operation had not been a one-off. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s emir, had established the organization in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s. After a humiliated Red Army withdrew in 1989 (with the USSR’s collapse imminent), bin Laden took the jihad global, targeting the United States — the “head of the snake,” as we were branded by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the bin Laden mentor and jihadist firebrand I prosecuted in the mid 1990s after the cell he’d established bombed the Twin Towers and plotted (unsuccessfully) simultaneous attacks on New York City landmarks. For a time in the early Nineties, al-Qaeda relocated to Sudan. By 1996, though, it had been enticed back to Afghanistan after that country’s takeover by the Taliban — a sharia-supremacist faction that had been forged by Islamist elements in the Pakistani regime as a geopolitical weapon to control its Afghan neighbor while countering rival India. In the five ensuing years, al-Qaeda constantly conspired to attack American targets, occasionally with horrific success: In 1998, the jihadists bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing over 200; and in 2000, they nearly sank a naval destroyer, the USS Cole, killing 17 American sailors.
