Well, it’s been ten long years since those towers turned to dust; the memorial is being dedicated on that site on Sunday. The mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is rotting away somewhere after being waterboarded 130 times. His boss, Osama bin Laden, is (supposedly) at the bottom of the sea. An attack of the same magnitude has not happened since. Does that mean we’ve won?
I’m not so sure. Consider that the goal of terrorism is terror. Al Qaeda may have won because:
- The US moved its air base out of Saudi Arabia in 2003, in accordance with bin Laden’s demand to do so.
- The actions of 27 people — 19 hijackers with box-cutters, one shoe bomber, six liquid bombers, and one underwear bomber — mean that billions of passengers are strip-searched at airports.
- Safety fears initially led people to avoid flying, causing major economic damage to the US airline industry. The tightening belt has made pilots, flight attendants and passengers stressed and surly.
- Fear translated into support for wars of aggression against two countries — Afghanistan and Iraq — that had had nothing to do with 9/11.
- The trillions of dollars spent on those two wars have bankrupted America in much the same way that the US claims to have bankrupted the Soviet Union to end the Cold War. Leading America into this kind of trap was a stated goal of bin Laden.
- The world has seen that the US military has only limited power and that US airspace — even around the Pentagon — is sometimes undefended.
- Americans surrendered basic freedoms and now allow the government to spy on their telephone calls, e-mail, banking and library records.
- America allowed itself to be distracted from its real (economic, infrastructure and corruption) problems.
- Americans are now divided against themselves.
For a handful of escaped mental patients, the terrorists have accomplished a lot, even if most of them are dead now. Of course, Al Qaeda may have lost because:
- With little fanfare, the US and its allies did attack and destroy most terrorist cells in dozens of countries, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Sudan and Yemen.
- The US got its hands on thousands of pages of documents from bin Laden’s headquarters, which will be of immense value in anticipating strategies used by future terrorists.
- Radical groups no longer have any appeal to Muslims living in the Middle East, as the Arab Spring showed.
We’ve learned a few things, too.
- Our knowledge of geography has improved vastly. Everybody now knows where Tikrit, Kandahar and Waziristan are.
- The US hasn’t been able to conquer all of Afghanistan, nor give it a functioning government, but it has outlasted the Soviet army there. At least we’re still winning the Cold War!
- The Iraq War allowed new, successful military strategies to be developed. I don’t mean “shock and awe”. I mean bribing warlords not to fight, and separating the warring parties by putting all the Sunnis on one side of town and all the Shia on the other.
- From Saddam Hussein’s scientists, we now know that weapons of mass destruction are much more expensive and difficult to build or acquire than previously thought — when a country is under sanctions.
Is the world safer now? Yes, a little. And after ten years, we should still be vigilant, but no longer afraid.
