25 Year Anniversary of 9/11: An American Catastrophe that Set the World on FireI was in Kabul on 9/11. The view was very different. My friend and colleague, Amir Shah predicted: “Afghanistan is going to burn”. I predicted: “The world is going to burn.” We were both right.
Afghan war carpets first emerged during and after the 1980s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and continued through the U.S.-led invasion and the final chaotic withdrawal in 2021. A sampling is depicted here. The others: the last is an image taken by the amazing Anja Niedringhaus who was killed in Afghanistan in 2014. It was taken in northeastern Kunar province following an errant U.S. bombing . The final one is myself in the basement of the AP house during the start of the U.S.-led invasion while the Taliban still controlled the Afghan capital, Kabul. At the time I was the only western corresponded in Kabul. It was just passed 6 p.m. in Kabul when the phone rang in the AP office, a small room on the upper floor of a three-story home in the Afghan capital’s posh Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood. It was a rare home with a basement, a feature that would later prove to be life saving. On the phone was the AP international editor in New York, Sally Jacobsen. A plane had hit one of the World Trade Centre towers. She didn’t know if it was an accident or intentional, or a terrorist attack, but, even before American intelligence mentioned his name, Sally did. Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan. If it were intentional we understood Afghanistan would become pivotal to the story. Then a second plane hit. She hung up. We waited. In Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban were ruling. They had banned TV and there were no images to see the extent of the tragedy, the billowing smoke, the dust, the harrowing images of desperate people trapped inside the towers leaping to their death. Barely 30 minutes later my friend and colleague. Amir Shah raced up the stairs, the radio at his ear, our only source of information. He was breathless. Another plane had smashed into the Pentagon in Washington. “Afghanistan is going to burn,” he said. He was right, but it would not only be Afghanistan that would burn, The fire would engulf the world. In the small room-cum- office, a friend, who worked for years for a European newspaper, looked at me and said ”our world will never be the same.” And it never was. It is crueler, extraordinarily less safe; ethnic, political and religious differences have become vast divides that threaten us all, terrorist groups have proliferated and morphed. Wars and internal conflicts dominate our global landscape. International laws count for nothing, selectively applied, selectively ignored. The lack of critical questioning and thinking by the media post 9/ll allowed unacceptable, illegal behavior by the U.S. administration to go unnoticed, or certainly unreported for years. Arbitrary kidnappings and torture went on for years before eventually being exposed and, even then, the horrors of America’s illegal actions were camouflaged by the use of euphemisms. Torture became ‘enhanced interrogation”. The arbitrary arrest of people, held for months and years without access to even the most basic of rights, taken to third countries to be tortured, were called “extraordinary renditions.” If you didn’t know better it would sound inoffensive, reminiscent of the latest rendition of a favorite tune. Of course it wasn’t. It was kidnappings, often of people in the dead of night, often with black hoods shoved over there heads. They were taken to third countries, like Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Pakistan, Afghanistan, taken by U.S. aircraft passing through European countries on their way to take their human cargo for torture. Law after law was brazenly violated while much of the world stood by in silence. To this day, the American leaders who planned, authorized, and carried out these illegal acts, authorized torture, unlawful confinement and a devastating invasion of another country, have escaped accountability. A modern take on an ancient philosophy says: “Adversity does not build character. It reveals it.” The revelation post-9/11 has not been kind to America. The so-called ‘war on terror’ has today left us all living in fear, whether it is fear of those of another faith or nationality, another country or color, another political party or view, even of those tasked to provide protection. The ‘war on terror’ began with the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, which ended in failure, because America turned the country over to thugs and warlords, feeding their corruption with suitcases full of money. while focusing its troops on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. While the invasion of Afghanistan may have seriously degraded al Qaida, it helped other terrorist groups to flourish __ more than 20, according to several U.N. reports. The Iraq invasion was based on lies, knowingly told by the U.S. government and spread by the New York Times. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in the multi-year conflict that produced the Islamic State, one of the deadliest and most persistent terrorist groups. In Iraq there was no Osama bin Laden, the man who masterminded the 9/11 attacks. America found him in Pakistan, years after U.S. President George Bush told Pakistan’s military dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, that he had a choice to make: “You are either with us, or against us.” Musharraf chose both. Yet the United States clung to Musharraf as an ally, even as Pakistanis sought his removal, demonstrated and eventually forced his fall from power. Several western embassies, who wanted to distance themselves from Musharraf, but didn’t, said privately at the time that Washington wanted the general to stay in power. They said they were told: He was an ally America needed. He wasn’t. While that horrific attacks of 9/11 claimed more than 3,000 lives, America’s ‘war on terror ‘ that followed claimed upward of one million lives, nearly 500,000 of those deaths were civilians __women, children, men, all with no connection, no involvement, in those attacks. Brown University’s “Cost of War” project calculated the human toll as well as the dollar cost of the many post 9/11 wars fought in the name of America’s ‘war on terror.’ It estimated the U.S. government has spent $8 trillion dollars on its many wars since 9/11. That figure does not include the latest U.S. and Israeli instigated war with Iran. When Hamas carried out its horrific Oct 7, 2023 attack on Israel, President Joe Biden warned Netanyahu against making the mistakes an enraged America made following 9/11. “Justice must be done. But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes,” Biden said. America’s illegal actions after 9/11, which Biden euphemistically called “mistakes,” were catastrophic abuses of power with devastating consequences. Biden’s choice to dismiss them as “mistakes” whitewashes both the abuse of power and the devastation they inflicted. Today there are more state-based conflicts than in any time since 1946, conflicts that directly feed terrorist networks, increase recruits, and generate more money for more terrorism. A U.S. think tank, The Atlantic Council, in its assessment of the state of terrorism 25 years on from 9/11 says, the United States in the execution of its ‘war on terror’, displayed a “failure of basic decency. The United States repeatedly betrayed partner trust, the one element of counterterrorism that no amount of technological or economic power can replace. From the Kurds to the Afghans, the United States abandoned allies who bled beside US soldiers once national interests shifted.” It’s not the first time of course. The U.S. ran away from the Afghan-Pakistan region in 1989, after the former Soviet Union ended its 10-year invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviets left defeated. The were defeated after the U.S. and Pakistan, together recruited, nurtured and financed every militant Islamic fighter they could find, including Osama bin Laden, to fight the “godless communists,” as U.S. President Ronald Reagan delighted in calling the Soviets. The origins of the 9/11 tragedy can reasonably be traced to that era, when Islamic fervor was deliberately harnessed and distorted religious narratives were elevated to fuel and inspire the Afghan resistance against the Soviet invasion. In that America was an active participant. In the early 1980s, America’s University of Nebraska developed a curriculum to teach English, among other subjects, to the millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan’s northwest, where they lived in massive camps having fled the invading Soviet soldiers. That University of Nebraska curriculum was intended to inspire support for the battle against the ‘godless communists.’ The English-language text taught Afghans “I” is for Infidel (the godless communists), “J” is for jihad and “K’ is for Kalashnikov to use in your jihad against the ‘godless communists.’ They learned their lessons well. America not at all. , © 2026 Kathy Gannon |