The US had at least 3 major responses to 9/11:
1) seek revenge (invade Afghanistan, kill Bin Laden),
2) armor up (Dept. of Homeland Security), and
3) unify under nationalism (flags everywhere).
step 1: have big terrorist attack on American civilians
step 2: American civilians ask "why me?", his words not mine btw.
step 3: civilians find out what US gov has been doing in the middle east and call for change.
In hindsight its an incredibly naïve plan. And I think it ironically shows a lack of knowing your enemy on his part. Americans don't take well to being attacked or intimidated. If you want them to leave you alone the worst thing you can do is provoke them to action.
The stated goal of the attacks was to show Americans that their continuous war and support for secular dictators in the Muslim world would come with high cost, and to force the American government to retreat from the Middle East.
This of course backfired spectacularly. Revenge is certainly a primary motivation, too, but I really don't think there is much room on the interpretation for the initial motivation because Al Qaeda was always very open and clear about it.
We fracked our way back to being the worlds largest oil producer. That, and our transition to a greener economy is bad news for middle eastern oil producers. We're much more willing to leave the entire region to their own miserable devices.
Biden is getting a lot of flack for pulling out of Afghanistan, and yes, he completely dropped the ball on the organization of the withdrawal, but if it means that not one more drop of american blood is shed, it's worth it.
The US has abandoned Syria, Iraq, Kurds. It still has some sway with Saudi Arabia and Israel, none in Egypt or Libya.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a culmination of that.
The neo-conservative response to Al Qaeda was exactly what was needed to provoke this collapse over 20 years.
The purpose of the 9/11 attacks was to get the American public to demand the US withdraws support to Israel and Saudi Arabia. This has clearly failed.
It wasn’t much involved in any of those (and indeed had already abandoned the Kurds after the conflict which motivated the formation of al-Qaeda) when al-Qaeda actually got organized. It got reinvolved with them largely enabled by the political fallout from 9/11.
> The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a culmination of that.
Again, that's mostly a reversion to the status quo ante.
No, this was not his goal, and no it did not fail. His stated goal was to recreate the mujahedeen success against the Soviet Union, where they used low cost guerrilla fighting to draw out a costly and unpopular war until it bankrupted the Soviets and then they retreated from Afghanistan. It is debatable how much effect the cost of the Afghan war had on the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the key is that Bin Laden believed it.
His goal was to drive out the Americans eventually. There is no evidence or reason to believe he thought that 9/11 would directly lead to American withdrawal from the Greater Middle East.
>”We—with Allah's help—call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.” Osama Bin Laden’s 1998 Fatwa [1]
Even in 2004, we knew that Al Qaeda propaganda fueled by US invasions of Muslim countries was strengthening, not weakening, Al Qaeda.
“Any assessment that the global terror movement has been rolled back or that even one component, Al Qaeda, is on the run is optimistic and most certainly incorrect. Bin Laden's doctrines are now playing themselves out all over the world. Destroying Al Qaeda will not resolve the problem.” 2004 M.J. Gohel, head of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London think tank [2]
And in his own words, what Bin Laden wanted out of the Afghan war, in 2004. Russia lasted 10 years before they were “forced to withdraw in defeat”. The US made almost made it to 20.
>”Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred”
>”All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.”
>”This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.” Bin Laden Interview in 2004 [3]
[1] https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm
[2] https://www.globalissues.org/article/512/the-new-face-of-al-...
[3] https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/september-11th/911-ac...
Suggestions that we shouldn't overreact because it plays right into their hands and that we shouldn't give up rights to the government out of simple fear that we'd just regret later didn't just go unheeded, they were vehemently attacked. It was worse polarization by far then we're seeing now, and it wasn't a more-or-less 50/50 split and didn't follow party lines.
People flying flags everywhere weren't a thing in the 80s or 90s?
Now we can go in to various conspiracies from “Bush planned 9.11 as a false flag” to “Bush ignored intelligence reports so he could launch the war on terror,” but those are mostly just unproven conspiracies unrelated to what al-Qaeda wanted.
States can, have, and do engage in terrorism.
Do we have a word for "imperialist government uses violence against people to achieve political goals"?
Because "it's not terrorism because it's a state" is always gonna stink of trying to dodge the topic on a technicality.
There seems to be a trend of calling every terrifying event “terrorism.” People sometimes colloquially refer to even non-political mass shootings as terrorism.
I believe it’s important to separate different types of mass violence. For example a gang-related mass shooting might be de-escalated by a mediator engaging the belligerents, whereas a war crime should be sent to international criminal court and a terrorist should be dealt with in a manner to minimize the earned media attention.
Huh. Do we call operation condor a war crime?
Yes, we call this "war".
> Because "it's not terrorism because it's a state" is always gonna stink of trying to dodge the topic on a technicality.
No, it's not. Nobody is trying to dogde the bad aspects of the word, it's just that terrorism specifically is, by definition, not from a state.
Note that the word "terror" appears 34 times in that Wikipedia article.
How many Americans even know Bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan for years after 11/9?
When I first seen 9/11 on TV as an 11 year old, I instantly thought that Ryadh will be turned into a crater within a few hours.
I dropped my jaw out of suprise, when I heard US going to declare war on Iraq — Saudis' biggest enemy. It made zero sense. I kept on watching the satellite TV at my neighbour's house, and was hoping that it was my knowledge of English failing me. It didn't.
You're being more than a little disingenuous ignoring the fact that we invaded Afghanistan specifically to go after the extremist group that was responsible for 9/11 about 2yr prior to invading Iraq, which was done for different reasons and "harboring terrorists" took a back seat to WMDs on that list of reasons.
There is a memo from Rumsfeld around then. [1]
The fact that all the terrorists were Saudi, that Bin Laden was Saudi, that Iraq was an enemy of the Saud regime, that Iraq was a "buffer" between the rest of the Middle East and Iran, all of that was ignored.
The war in Iraq was the US worst foreign affairs decision in the last 50 years.
All of the "WMD" and then "bringing democracy" was retconning the original desire to finish the first Iraq war, which had nothing to do with 9/11.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-...
There are many possible motives for terrorism but I highly doubt this is one of them, even though people love to repeat it for some reason.
I don't think that makes sense.
If say terrorist actions resulted in the opposite, say a nation providing less security / fewer restrictions:
We would then logic it out and say the goal of terrorism is to restrict fewer freedoms and thus allow the terrorists more freedom to do whatever it is they wanted.... including more terrorism.
But that's obviously also not the point of terrorism.
Terrorists are pushing their own political agenda via violence, that's it, the result isn't necessarily some intent / scheme. If they don't get what they ultimately want, I don't think they give a damn about security or etc.
No it isn't. Not any more than it is the goal of burglars to get people to invest in home security. The goal of terrorism is to use attacks on civilians to achieve political goals, like getting Northern Ireland out of the UK or get the US out of the Middle East.
Why would terrorists care how much the enemy restricts their own freedom? Just because something hurt your enemy does not mean it helps you get closer to your goal.
I think that's a good general observation, but a key assumption of terrorism is that hurting your enemy /will/ pressure them to do what you want.
Terrorism is all about out unconventional ways of bringing pain to your enemy, rather than just defeating their military in combat. So I think terrorism can definitely be intended to sow fear, paranoia, overreaction, internal division, etc within the enemy civil society.
Not as the end goal, but as part of the strategy of inflicting paint to pressure them to capitulate.
We have to be careful to not assign whatever motivation or outcome we don’t like as “the goal of terrorism.” You can justify anything that way, and people do. “If you do the thing I don’t like, the terrorists win” can cut both ways.
Terrorists have specific goals they are trying to achieve with violence, usually ideological or political or both. Bin Laden thought his ideology would have room to grow if he could scare the U.S. into leaving. He was wrong about that. The fact that we still have to take shoes off at the airport (annoying as it is) does not mean he won.
Terrorists do what they do for many reasons. Some are political, some are due to sectarianism. Sometimes its because they are crazy and have irrational motivations.
Rarely is it the goal of the terrorist to force a society into tyranny.
Timothy McVeigh was seeking revenge.
Bin Laden was trying to force the US to change its foreign policy.
ISIS was trying to conquer the middle east.
Aum Shinrikyo were a doomsday cult.
So on and so on.
Terrorism is a tactic and wars on Nouns (Terror, Drugs, etc) never make sense.
Terrorism is killing a lot of innocent civilians in order to incite terror in a population to bend to your demands. They have an agenda and feel they are justified.
To any motivated anti-society organization or person, this is huge leverage. A few deaths leading to a noticeably more authoritarian state? What's not to love?
It doesn't even matter if the authorities do their job and punish those responsible, the people will still choose to restrict their own freedoms and makes their lives worse for more "security".