A chain of events that changed the world,
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States was an unchallenged superpower. Then came the invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraq war, and other events that diminished the U.S. and let other powers rise
Inro
It’s impossible to understand the many ripples the 9/11 attacks set in motion without remembering the world as it existed before they occurred.
The Cold War had ended a decade earlier, leaving the United States as the world’s one unchallenged superpower. Its last major shooting war, the (first) Gulf War, ended in victory — with Kuwait liberated from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and a ticker tape parade down Broadway. “By God, we’ve licked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” U.S. President George Bush (the first one) gushed when it was over. No quagmire here. America hit hard and got out. A lot of Iraqis who rose against Saddam died after the U.S. got out, but nobody paid much attention.
NATO military interventions in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars were mostly successful. Russia and China protested NATO’s bombing campaign in Kosovo, but nobody needed to pay much attention to China or Russia back then either. On New Year’s Eve 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin handed power over to his young and relatively unknown prime minister, Vladimir Putin.
The hijacked planes that crashed into the World Trade Center flew through the blue skies of a clear and gentle day that seemed to stretch summer past its natural end date. They struck an America that was complacent and inward-looking but also confident. It became vengeful.
A few days after the attacks, U.S. President George Bush (the second one) stood in the ruins of the World Trade Center and, surrounded by rescue workers and firefighters, began a prepared speech.
“We can’t hear you!” someone in the crowd shouted. “I can hear you!” Bush responded. “The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” Bush’s approval rating would plummet in the years ahead, but in that moment he perfectly captured America’s righteous anger and will to do something with it.
Invasion of Afghanistan
The people who knocked those buildings down were members of al-Qaida, a jihadist terrorist group led by Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaida was sheltered by the Taliban, atavistic and joyless Islamists who ruled most of Afghanistan with a combination of brutality and support from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.
Opposing them were various Afghan militias and warlords, most notably the Northern Alliance, led by the charming and cultured Ahmad Shah Massoud until he was murdered by al-Qaida agents posing as journalists two days before the September 11 attacks.
American and allied special forces teamed up with Northern Alliance fighters to drive the Taliban from power. They also drove many of the Taliban’s al-Qaida allies, including Osama bin Laden, into the Tora Bora cave complex in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan near Pakistan. From there, bin Laden’s trail went cold — for a while.
An internationally recognized interim government under the leadership of Hamid Karzai was formed in Kabul, and the NATOled International Security Assistance Force was established under a UN mandate. Canadian troops took part in what was thought to be mopping-up operations against the Taliban. Four died on a training exercise in April 2002 when an American pilot mistook them for Taliban fighters and dropped a bomb on them. They were the first of 158 Canadian soldiers to die in the Afghanistan war.
Invasion of Iraq
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks — or at least it should have had nothing to do with them. The attacks were not planned by Saddam Hussein’s regime or anyone under its control. But George W. Bush and members of his administration had a longstanding beef with Saddam and were emboldened by their apparent success in Afghanistan. The prospect of a rogue regime using or giving terrorists weapons of mass destruction — which Saddam once had and which American and other western intelligence agencies thought were still in his possession — was Washington’s casus belli. The U.S. gathered a “Coalition of the Willing” — which did not include Canada — and went to war in March 2003. Baghdad fell in April. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in May. An insurgency was already beginning to smoulder. More than 4,000 Americans eventually died in a war that cost the country more than $2 trillion (U.S.).
Iraq now has a functional government and its people are free of a dictator who murdered tens of thousands of them. But the costs, to the U.S. and Iraq, were enormous, and the question persists: what might the United States have accomplished, what harm might it have avoided, if that blood and treasure were spent somewhere else? There are Afghans who wish the U.S. had stayed focused on their country. There are Americans who wish it had focused on theirs.
Guantanamo Bay
Nothing symbolizes the U.S.’s post-9/11 violations of human rights and the rule of law with more clarity than the Guantanamo Bay detention camp at an American military base in Cuba. The camp was established to house terror suspects and enemy combatants where they would not be be guaranteed legal protections under the U.S. Constitution. Detainees have suffered torture and indefinite detention without trial. These abuses weren’t limited to Guantanamo Bay but happened also at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and at CIA-run “black sites,” or secret detention centres, around the world. America’s so-called “War on Terror” was always going to be won or lost in the hearts and minds of people in countries where terrorists and tyrants held sway. Every time a photo or story of American abuse went public, that task got a little more difficult.
What was gained?
No honest accounting of the repercussions of 9/11 and the wars that followed can discount the progress made in Afghanistan over the past 20 years. There’s a reason the Taliban’s triumph in Afghanistan is so devastating to so many Afghans. Many — especially girls and women — embraced the opportunity to live freer lives than would have been possible during the Taliban’s rule. What was achieved can be forbidden but it can’t be erased. We don’t know how Afghanistan’s educated women, journalists, politicians, activists and democrats will impact their country in the years ahead. Some will suffer or die at the Taliban’s hands. Some already have. But they’re not going to lie down forever.
Syria and the end of Responsibility to Protect
In August 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama faced a test. The regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had just launched a sarin gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, killing perhaps 1,400 people, including children. Obama had previously called chemical weapons a “red line” for his administration, vowing “enormous consequences” if they were used. Assad’s regime had already murdered thousands. It seemed certain this outrage would push the U.S. to take military action against it. Obama, however, backed down, accepting a Russia-brokered deal that saved Assad from airstrikes in exchange for a promise to give up all his chemical weapons. (Spoiler alert: he didn’t.)
In an interview with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg three years later, Obama acknowledged if it weren’t for the U.S.’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (plus a NATO-led intervention in Libya), he might have been more willing to act decisively in Syria. Today, Assad is still in power, many more Syrians are dead, and some six million survivors are refugees outside the country.
The UN-endorsed principle of “Responsibility to Protect” obliges states to protect people from war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity when their government fails to do so. After the world chose not to protect Syrian children from a dictator who gassed them to death, it’s difficult to imagine what atrocity might now convince the United States, or any other democracy, to take seriously its responsibility to protect anyone.
Democracy's wave crests and recedes
In his second inaugural address in January 2005, George W. Bush said the survival of liberty in the U.S. “increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” This was Bush’s post-9/11 “Freedom Agenda” — a policy of promoting and spreading democracy to undercut the anti-American hatred he believed was a root cause of terrorism in places without political freedom.
The U.S. helped advance democracy somewhat in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but the electoral success of Islamist movements like Hamas in Palestine soon convinced Bush America’s old policy of backing “a son of a bitch but our son of a bitch” wasn’t so bad after all.
The United States can still influence political change elsewhere through the power of its example, but its beacon has dimmed because of human rights and its military’s excesses and mistakes. Coupled with this is the growing strength of autocratic Russia and China, which have watched America’s costly and faltering military interventions with glee.
Freedom and democracy are not exclusively western values. That so many Afghans — and Syrians and Egyptians and Iranians and others — have risked and suffered far more than most Canadians ever will to obtain freedoms we take for granted should put paid to that conceit. But democracy is a global struggle, and its greatest champion is weaker and less persuasive than it has been in a long time.
The Reckoning
The final chapter of 9/11 isn’t yet written. The changes that began that morning will continue to shape the future in ways we can’t know for certain, but some trends are clear.
The U.S. is today less confident about what it can do in the world and less willing to try. Fewer people and nations would trust the U.S. now even if it were to promise help. Russia and China recognize this and will try to profit by it.
Canada played a large role in carving out time and space for Afghans to achieve what they did over the last 20 years, especially in Kandahar province, where Canadian troops fought between 2006 and 2011 and where Canada suffered most of its casualties. Canada’s sacrifices in Afghanistan also demonstrated its commitment to NATO and to the United States, though it’s hard to argue Ottawa’s investment in its relationship with Washington has paid lasting dividends. Tensions persist on trade and COVID border restrictions, and it took until this July for U.S. President Joe Biden to get around to choosing a U.S. ambassador to Canada — David Cohen, a bagman with no diplomatic experience.
Canada’s inability to save so many Afghans who risked their lives to help Canadian soldiers, diplomats, aid workers and journalists, and who may now perish as a result, should lead to a reckoning in this country. It probably won’t. Canadians demand little from their political leaders on matters of foreign policy.
We’re not finished with Afghanistan, though. Thousands of Afghans will make new homes in Canada in the years ahead. Just as Canada was enriched by Iranians fleeing the 1979 Islamic Revolution and settling here, we will similarly benefit from Afghans fleeing the Taliban. Afghanistan will be the poorer for it.