How Do the Events of 9/11 Continue to Reverberate in World Affairs?

Corporation grantees reflect on the challenges facing America and the world twenty years later

By Stephen J. Del RossoSeptember 10, 2021

Marking the fifth-year anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, I observed at the time that “…the world seems a scarier place. A successor to the attacked twin towers has yet to be built, and like the phantom limb syndrome suffered by amputees, Americans continue to feel the pain of what has been lost far beyond the void at ground zero. ‘Terrorism’ — an evocative abstraction invoked to describe a range of tangible threats from suicide bombings and plots to blow up airliners, to potential attacks with weapons of mass destruction — provides the backdrop for our collective insecurity. While multiconfessional fundamentalists may see upheaval in the Middle East, floods, earthquakes, and other scourges as harbingers of the imminent ‘end days,’ the more secularly minded are worried and perplexed by the seemingly unremitting bad news about the sorry state of the world and the human condition.”

Well, fifteen years on as we mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11, at least the physical void at ground zero has been filled — for that much Americans can be grateful. But the troubling tidings continue apace, and, distressingly, the world seems to have grown even scarier.

To the earlier roster of perceived threats can be added, among others, a global pandemic, climate change, democratic regression, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, intensified great power rivalry, cyber attacks, social media-fueled misinformation, growing inequality, and endless (or ignominiously ended) wars. Somehow, in the early 20th century, amid anarchist assassinations, regional conflicts, and the nascent rumblings of The Guns of August, Andrew Carnegie, the preternatural optimist and founder of Carnegie Corporation of New York, believed that “it is possible to point to many bright rays piercing the dark cloud that encourage us.”

While even Carnegie might have found it challenging to detect such rays today, there has been notable progress in many fields — from biomedicine and poverty alleviation to the continued, if seemingly precarious, taboo against the use of nuclear weapons — that tends to get obscured by new and alarming streams of “unremitting bad news.” While remaining clear-eyed about the challenges facing America and the world, the Corporation and other philanthropies continue to support efforts to decrease the shadows cast by contemporary dark clouds and bring a measure of light where needed.

To reflect on the enduring significance of what occurred in lower Manhattan twenty years ago, we asked four Corporation grantees representing a range of institutions and substantive interests to respond to the question: How do the events of 9/11 continue to reverberate in world affairs? This is an intentionally broad question, and, not surprisingly, the answers are appropriately broad, as well as insightful.

Comfort Ero

Comfort Ero, Interim Vice President and Africa Program Director, International Crisis Group

There is little question that the assaults in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, and the period of high-octane interventionism that followed continue to cast a long shadow on many parts of the continent. Set back on its heels (for now) in the Levant, the Islamic State (ISIS) is claiming the support of a string of affiliates in Africa, even if the link rarely extends to operational collaboration. Al-Qaeda, too, has lost ground in the Middle East but retains strong affiliates on the continent. In parts of the Lake Chad basin, the Sahel, and Somalia, militant groups not only occupy territory but also offer services – particularly in the administration of a rough but enforced form of justice – filling a yawning governance vacuum left by indifferent ruling elites. In Mozambique, a new, bloody movement rooted in local grievances but including elements claiming wider jihadist aspirations has in recent months intensified its attacks, wreaking havoc in the country’s north and drawing recruits from up and down the Swahili coast.

Paths to militancy are complex and varied, as Crisis Group has long argued, and do not correspond to grievances alone. But perceptions of marginalization offered fodder that entrepreneurs as varied as Hamadou Koufa in Mali, Mohammed Yusuf in Nigeria, and Aboud Rogo in Kenya could exploit, targeting a tiny yet potent fringe within the Muslim community and guiding them onto the path of militancy. Their core message was that jihadism was the best way to change illegitimate and corrupt local governance systems and that these local wars were part of a larger, just cause. The 9/11 attacks provided inspiration to these actors, with figures such as Yusuf, who was based at the time in the northern Nigerian town of Maiduguri and went on to found Boko Haram, attracting large new audiences.

(Excerpted from “Africa: Escaping 9/11’s Long Shadow” by Comfort Ero and Murithi Mutiga, Crisis Group's Horn of Africa Project Director.)

Marc Lynch

Marc Lynch, Director of the Project on Middle East Political Science and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University

The American response to 9/11 fundamentally reshaped the Middle East, in almost every way for the worse. The excesses of the Global War on Terror – from surveillance, torture, and rendition to Guantanamo Bay – strengthened authoritarian regimes, undermined global norms, galvanized anti-Americanism, and eviscerated America's moral standing.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq, justified as a response to 9/11 despite having no connection to those events, devastated that country, energized new and more virulent forms of jihadism and sectarianism, and trapped America in a costly quagmire. Simplistic equations of 9/11 with Islamism, or even with Islam itself, had enduring negative effects on Muslims around the world, leaving scars which may never heal.

Not all is grim, however. The lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the War on Terror have resonated with a new generation of Americans, spreading a healthy skepticism about military intervention abroad. The impassioned response to President Donald Trump's "Muslim ban" bore witness to this new inspirational activism in support of Muslims at home and abroad, an unintended but vital legacy of those dark years.

Sir Adam Thomson

Adam Thomson, Director, European Leadership Network; Formerly UK Ambassador to NATO, UK Ambassador to Pakistan, and UK Foreign Ministry Director for South Asia and Afghanistan

The terrorists won.

They did not end U.S. support for Israel, Saudi presence, Iraq sanctions, perceived oppression of Muslims, or supposed U.S. “immorality." But 9/11 is still with us in things done and things not done that have served terrorist aims – forcing us to change course, exaggerating their strength, attracting support for their cause.

9/11 drove changes in travel, law enforcement, intelligence, and civil liberties that made international terrorism harder. But it also jerked the United States, allies in tow, into a military response and one not just against Al Qaeda, but against the Taliban (who were never international terrorists), and into an overconfident, overstated Global War on Terror.

We got “shock and awe” and 20 years of occupation in Afghanistan, failing to eliminate Al Qaeda, against which drone strikes and special forces proved more effective. We got Iraq, ISIS, eroded performance on human rights and international law, lasting rifts in the transatlantic alliance and a widened gulf between the West and the Rest. We got the greater militarization of U.S. and Western foreign policy and, now, U.S. disenchantment with ‘forever wars’ and even foreign engagement.

As time passes, the 9/11 ripples intersect with those from other events, making patterns harder to read. But the ripples help explain the European Leadership Network’s mission of dialogue and guerrilla diplomacy for a safer Europe. Our age of rage, rising risks, and problems finding common ground on common challenges surely has some roots in 9/11 and the paths we did not take thereafter.

Heidi Peltier

Heidi Peltier, Project Director, Costs of War Project at Boston University, and Assistant Research Professor, Department of Political Science

The U.S. responded to the attacks of 9/11 with a “War on Terror” that included not only the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq but also increased homeland security and new or expanded counterterrorism operations in the Middle East and Africa. U.S. Federal spending for the post-9/11 wars and related expenses has already totaled $5.8 trillion, a figure that rises to $8 trillion when we include future obligations to veterans of these wars.

U.S. contractors were among the few who reaped any benefits of these interventions, earning hundreds of billions of dollars providing goods and services in the war zones. In recent years, more than half of the entire U.S. Department of Defense budget has been spent on private contractors, or what we might call the “Camo Economy,” as the funding, employment, and profits of these contractors, as well as the injuries and deaths, are largely hidden from public view.

Nearly a million lives were directly lost in the post-9/11 conflicts; millions more if we include the indirect deaths due to damage to infrastructure, healthcare facilities, and food and water supply. The trillions of dollars spent by the U.S., as well as spending by other countries, would have better served the global economy and the environment had this spending been used for education, healthcare, or expansion of clean energy and environmental protection.

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