What did we learn from Sept. 11, 2001?
Twenty years later.
It still feels like today. This morning. Right now.
His was one of the thousands of lives lost 20 years ago, no more or less valuable than anyone else’s life. But he was a friend from high school and college and that made his death personal. It’s still personal.
Timothy Coughlin had made it to the very top, literally, the 103rd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Tim was a bond trader for Cantor-Fitzgerald and something of a Wall Street legend, as much for his heart, humor and humanity as for his professional success.
But the top was a terrible place to be 20 years ago. Evil arrived at 500 miles per hour. Tim never really stood a chance.
Undoubtedly his last thoughts were of his beautiful wife, Maura, and three very young children, Ryann, 4, Sean, 3, and Riley only 6 months as he was forced by the jet-fueled inferno to take a fatal leap.
Forget? Never. Forgive? I’ll get back to you on that.
Like millions I stared in dumbfounded horror at the
television as the first tower collapsed in a toxic eruption of dust and debris. Oh my God! Then my thoughts turned to Timmy. Maybe he was on vacation? Or a meeting somewhere else? Maybe home sick? Wouldn’t that be a lucky flu?
And I thought of Frankie O, a construction worker I knew as a kid on a summer job for the Parks Department in New York in ’73. Frank was moonlighting with us, having been laid off from Otis Elevator after completing his work on the World Trade Center.
Now it’s all gone; the Trade Center, Frankie O’s elevators and Tim Coughlin.
I wrote most of the above paragraphs 10 years ago when we still had hope for Afghanistan. Now, that too is gone.
The Taliban are back where they were when America was hit, where they harbored bin Laden and his co-conspirators, piling a new tragedy upon the old tragedy.
Twenty years ago, few of us knew anything about the Taliban. Mavis Leno was nearly alone in warning the public that Afghanistan was in the hands of maniacal, misogynistic, religious extremists. Truthfully, I didn’t even know where Afghanistan was.
Then, in March of 2001, six months before the September 11th attacks, the Taliban blew up two 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha carved into the cliffs of the Bamyan Valley northwest of Kabul.
This desecration was perpetrated on the direct orders of Mullah Omar, head of the Taliban government, at the urging of Osama bin Laden. This seemingly insane act of cultural vandalism has magnified in importance over time. In retrospect, the destruction of the Buddhas should have been a huge red flag that nationbuilding in Afghanistan would be a fool’s errand.
As a Taliban leader recently said, “America has the watches, but we have the time.” What’s 20 years to a people with all the time in the world?
Now is the time for Americans to think of what comes next.
There will be a next time.
Do we reflexively hit back militarily like we’ve been doing? Do we turn the other cheek? Neither option seems promising in light of the last 70 years of history. What president could survive politically turning the other cheek after an attack on the scale of September 11? And who will blindly support the next president who wants to deploy America’s sons and daughters halfway around the world to remake an ancient culture in our image?
Those who believe American foreign policy is the root cause of our conflict with the Islamic world need to think again. Those statues predated America by 1,300 years, Israel by 1,354 years. The Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS, et al., are at war with any idea that does not conform to their narrowly defined orthodoxy. Last week, the Taliban destroyed the instruments of the National Music Institute where Afghanistan’s first all-female orchestra, “Zohra,” named after the music goddess in Persian writings, once practiced. How will we ever reconcile Western values with that?
In August of 2000, at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, thencandidate George W. Bush said, “A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam. When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear, and the victory must be overwhelming.”
What lessons will the generation shaped by Afghanistan learn? How do we define “victory” in the war on terrorism?
How we do this is way above my pay grade, but there has to be a better way than continuing to deceive ourselves into a false sense of security, or a belief in the inexorable triumph of American military might; one led to the 9/11 attacks, the other to the catastrophic failure in Afghanistan.
Thousands died 20 years ago and thousands more died in wars since. We owe it to the dead to make their sacrifice as meaningful as it was courageous. We owe it to Ryann, now 24, Sean, 23, and Riley Coughlin, soon to turn 21, and to all our children and all children to come, to find a new way of protecting ourselves from extremism, especially the growing homegrown variants.