Unfinished War

Twenty-five years after September 11th 2001, the most consequential question is what has the world learnt from it. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people while shattering the illusion of American invulnerability and inaugurating two decades of war, radicalisation and instability. After all this, the enduring central lesson remains that terrorism does not disappear because its most visible organisation is defeated.

Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda did not emerge from out of the blue. Its attacks on American targets in the 1990s, its bombings of US embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole had provided ample warning of what was coming. Intelligence failures, including the inability of the CIA and FBI to share vital information, had compounded the failure of political leadership to act decisively on mounting warnings.

The price of institutional complacency was paid in form of the shocking strikes where two hijacked aircraft wrecked the Twin Towers, one of America’s most recognisable symbols of power, while a third aircraft slammed into the Pentagon, the heart of the American military establishment and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.

The response after 9/11 saw terrorism moved from the periphery of international security to its centre. For India, this represented a belated recognition of a threat New Delhi had confronted for years. The Parliament attack of December 2001 followed within months while in 2008, Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists brought the same transnational jihadist menace to Mumbai, killing more than 160 people.

The quarter-century since 9/11 has demonstrated that terrorism is remarkably adaptive. Jihadist violence has become more diffuse: local franchises, online radicalisation, lone attackers and loosely connected ideological networks can achieve effects once requiring elaborate hierarchies. The Sahel, the Maghreb, Somalia and parts of West Asia demonstrate that the problem has not vanished. It has merely mutated.

That makes complacency particularly dangerous. The absence of another 9/11-scale attack on American soil is a genuine achievement of intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies. But it is not proof that the threat has disappeared. Patience, adaptation and opportunism are among terrorism’s most persistent characteristics.

There is also a danger in allowing counter-terrorism to become captive to domestic political agendas. The machinery created after 9/11 took years to build and depended heavily on institutional memory, specialised personnel and intelligence-sharing networks. Budget reductions, loss of experienced officers and the dismantling of programmes designed to prevent radicalisation can weaken that architecture precisely when governments believe the danger has receded.

The deeper mistake would be to imagine that counter-terrorism is a war that can simply be declared over. Terrorism is not a conventional enemy waiting to sign a surrender. The political grievances, ideological ecosystems and fragile states in which violent movements thrive require a longer strategy.

9/11 should therefore be remembered not merely as the day America was attacked, but as the day the world was warned. The warning was clear. The challenge today is not to wait for another catastrophe before taking it seriously.