We had no inconveniences, such as social media alerts or even a proper phone connection. But my London-based producer was desperately trying to get there, with the first news of a plane (maybe a small propeller plane, maybe an accident) hitting New York’s World Trade Center. And that it should be ready immediately to deploy again.
It’s easier said than done in a place with no airport, no scheduled flights or live TV to control events. Finally, we rented a pond and arrived first at Côte d’Ivoire Airport, Côte d’Ivoire. There, now the full horror was evident on the huge screens that carried CNN live.
Even the frightening brain Osama bin Laden had not fully expected this amount of world disruptions; he didn’t even expect the Twin Towers to fall. In the famous video discovered by US forces after making it out of Afghanistan, he had drawn his engineering background, with gestures in his hands, to explain why he thought only the floors above the impact of the aircraft would melt and be shot down.
So what is the straight line I see drawn from here to here? How have other people asked, on September 11 of the day, a moment or a whole change that defines the era in the understanding and vision of the United States about itself at home and abroad? Did the response to 9/11 cause as much damage as the attack?
I have concluded that the answer is yes. My own question is whether 20 years can be recalibrated or whether Bin Laden’s attack was the beginning of the end of the American empire.
On August 15, when the Taliban entered Kabul, when Afghanistan fell and re-commissioned the full circle, I could not help but have this sharp setback: for the second time in 32 years, a group of misogynistic and anti-democratic Afghan insurgents had defeated a superpower. On August 15 it was the United States. In 1989 it was the Soviet Union and its ten-year occupation.
It came back to me in April 1996, when I started covering Afghanistan and the total acquisition of the Taliban.
What I learned about the Taliban then reports everything I preach for their government now. The Taliban official I interviewed after taking over the capital a few months later, in November 1996 – Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai – is his deputy foreign minister today, as he was then. Of course, I asked her about women’s rights and she gave me the same unpromising strikes she now does in the world.
Why is it relevant today? Well, for basic human rights reasons, but also to emphasize once and for all the people involved in the long term.
As former U.S. military officials even admit, the Taliban have been playing the long game since the U.S. defeated them after 9/11. Some Americans are willing to acknowledge that the Taliban have used the last twenty years to make strategies, wait and act. The United States, not so much. As Special Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan John Sopko told CNN, the United States has not waged a 20-year war on Afghanistan, but 20 one-year wars.
I realize that now, when I look back at the short-term decisions and costly, difficult, and difficult interventions of the United States around the world, which together since 9/11 have contributed to exhaustion and isolationism. at home today, and growing cynicism. and anger at the role of America as a force for good abroad.
A third way?
The hugely baffled withdrawal of President Joe Biden from Afghanistan does not invalidate what he said about not trying to rebuild other countries in the image of the United States. But who asked the United States to do the same? It is a false mission that creates failure, becomes the inevitable straw dog in the face of defeat, and leads to the false conclusion that, therefore, the United States should only pack up and return home, with the his troops and their ideals under lock and key.
It is a binary doctrine of all or nothing. Are you sure there is a third way? Only in my time have I witnessed the success of U.S.-led humanitarian interventions. After staying out of the ethnic cleansing that tore Bosnia and Europe apart during the 1990s, the emerging genocide was finally left too much to ignore by the United States, and it intervened to stop it and subsequently did the hard work. diplomatic work of peace, with the Dayton Accords in 1995. It is imperfect and currently put at risk by nationalists, but it has maintained peace without permanent American or NATO occupation, or an attempt to recreate America in the Balkans.
A few years later, America and a willing coalition intervened to prevent a similar genocide in Kosovo. Again, imperfect, but since 1999 Kosovo is independent and a reliable ally of the United States.
A few years later, British Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered an intervention to end the brutal civil war in Sierra Leone, which is now at peace in that part of West Africa. No attempt was made to remake any of these nations “in our image.”
By contrast, in December 1992 I witnessed President George HW Bush’s humanitarian intervention in Somalia to stop a devastating famine amid an ongoing civil war. It worked brilliantly to end hunger. However, you didn’t have to be there to find out why he got off the rails. It is clear as a day for anyone who has read the book or seen the movie “Black Hawk Down”. The fluency of the mission took over and the United States went from ending hunger to trying to eradicate radicals. It ended in disaster.
In 1994 a serious case of foreign policy insecurity was presented in Rwanda. In 1994, burned, humble and simply ignorant and inhumane, the Clinton administration led a UN effort not to intervene. The genocide killed between 800,000 and one million people in just three months. To his credit, former President Bill Clinton has repeatedly apologized.
There have been no acknowledgments or apologies from the presidents and prime ministers who devised the post-11/11 policies that have dominated the past 20 years.
Handily called it the “war on terror”, gave carte blanche to the endless flow of the mission and sent American politics through the dark hole from which the Guantanamo Bay prison came out, where there are still 39 suspects without trial because the previous “interrogations” were in fact, torture, which is still inadmissible in American courts. It led to “black spots” around the world where American values died amid the grenade of beatings, sexual humiliations, animal attacks and waterboarding.
It established a lasting division between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds, as well as endless electronic surveillance of normal people.
Maintain global values
Former defense policy member Kori Schake was at the Pentagon on September 11th. This week he spoke to me about the real fears of that day and acknowledged that they had caused serious mistakes, especially in shifting the American avengers from where they were, legitimately, to Afghanistan, where they ended up illegitimately. in Iraq.
She is now director of foreign policy and defense studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which incubates the intellectual “brain confidence” for the 2003 Iraq war that George W. Bush and his neo-cons will fervently want to follow. Now, he says, there is an opportunity even in AEI to help find this third route: neither a reactive military intervention, nor a knee withdrawal, but something in between, based on maintaining the set of global values that the The United States built from the ashes of World War II.
Now, outside the ashes of 9/11, we need a George Marshall, that scholar, soldier, and man of unique state, who reconquered us with the plan for the United States to re-engage with the world, and above all , advocated a strong democracy.
It’s something an exhausted America could be proud of and not only does an updated version are needed, it’s indispensable. Because we really want to do a full circle everywhere, like we do now in Afghanistan? There, a nation has been returned to the terrorist forces that the West went to defeat in the first place. Do we want to further strengthen global authoritarianism by ceding competition of ideas to Beijing or Moscow? I don’t think so, but we risk letting this happen.
I know that many Americans may have had enough of being the exceptional nation that self-describes itself, but in the late 1990s I was perfecting my journalistic experience in the American era, the “indispensable nation”. I believed it then, and while my confidence is severely shaken after 9/11, I think it is possible to restore that image with a little serious work and thought. Because even in Afghanistan it was done very well. And despite Biden’s claims, tens of thousands of Afghans fought and died to protect those gains.
And journalists have an important role to play. In the late 1990s we passed through the Afghanistan of the Taliban. But at that moment we reported the facts and the truth, so that we can see with our own eyes that history repeats itself.
As a believer in enduring global ideals and the values that America has always promoted and championed, I will continue to do so with my coverage. It begins with the conscious and robust defense of all the basic principles of truth and facts. As the late Senator Daniel Moynihan said in the 1980s, “everyone has a right to their opinion, but not to their own facts.”
Given, in my current contemplative mood, that our biggest existential threat now is climate catastrophe, I start with the mantra I came to while covering the genocide in Bosnia: we must be truthful and not neutral. Not all parties are created equal and it is not up to us to create a false equivalence. There is a special power in knowing and practicing this.