25 Years After 9/11, What Have We Learned?

For a full decade after 9/11, Osama bin Laden was the most wanted man in the world. A few weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, in mid-December 2001, the al-Qaeda leader felt so endangered by a vengeful United States that he decided to dictate his will. In it, he took the extraordinary step of telling his children not to have anything to do with al-Qaeda,” the organization he had founded. “Bin Laden felt he’d failed,” journalist Peter Bergen tells us in his new book, All the Presidents’ Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror.

Bin Laden’s American pursuers came within just a few hundred yards of snagging him at Tora Bora, where the U.S. Army fought one of the highest-altitude battles in its history—yet the general in charge, Tommy Franks, to his everlasting infamy, let al-Qaeda’s top men slip away across the border into Pakistan. In the years that followed, the U.S. built up a vast counterterrorism apparatus aimed, in part, at hunting down the man who had organized the largest foreign attack on the homeland in American history.

And what was bin Laden himself doing in the meantime? After his great escape he managed to settle down in the lush and remote Swat Valley, an area sometimes known as the “Switzerland of Pakistan.” It was there, Bergen tells us, that bin Laden and his young wife Amal got back to having sex: “Fugitives typically don’t have children while they are on the run, since they tend to slow you down, but bin Laden had four children with Amal while they were hiding in Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks.” Amal, who was Yemeni, pretended to be deaf to dodge uncomfortable questions from Pakistani officials. “Bin Laden must have believed,” Bergen wryly notes, “the US had no clue about where he was, so he could take the risk of enlarging his family.”

Bin Laden wasn’t entirely wrong. It would take the Americans a full decade after the 9/11 attacks to finally catch up with him. Even so, the man who was so often depicted by his enemies as an all-seeing terrorist mastermind comes across in this book as a bit of a dunderhead. “The attack on 9/11 was a great propaganda coup for al-Qaeda, but it produced the opposite strategic effect of what bin Laden had intended,” Bergen writes. “The United States became more involved in the Muslim world than at any time in its history, launching various kinds of military operations across the region, greatly damaging al-Qaeda and its affiliates.” Contrary to those who believe that bin Laden was artfully scheming to drag Washington into a Middle Eastern quagmire, he actually assumed that the U.S. was a decadent has-been in the throes of collapse—just like the splintering Soviet Union when it was chased out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. It was a view shaped by stories he’d heard from jihadi veterans about the humiliating American exit from Somalia after losing a handful of soldiers in the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993.

This wasn’t the al-Qaeda leader’s only miscalculation. By 2006, other holy warriors were abandoning him in droves, appalled by his acolytes’ attacks on fellow Muslims in Iraq. Bin Laden even felt compelled to issue a public apology, urging his followers in al-Qaeda’s notorious Iraqi branch, led by the psychopathic jihadi Abu Musab Zarqawi, to correct their “mistakes.” That pathetic effort to rein in his protege was emblematic. Even as bin Laden became increasingly irrelevant to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he was struggling to maintain his hold on the organization, issuing streams of memoranda from his final hideout in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.

One is left with the impression that he managed to elude his pursuers through sheer good luck, the concealment offered by the huge population of a chaotic Pakistan, and the cluelessness of America’s leaders, who ended up diverting mind-boggling resources to the invasion of Iraq, a war of choice if there ever was one.

Bergen is unsparing in his critique of the twenty-first century’s greatest villain, but he is also quite skeptical—to varying degrees—about the four presidents who figure in the story. George W. Bush and his team have, of course, been widely vilified for launching the Iraq War under false pretenses. This was a cardinal sin that their successors have been cleaning up ever since—most prominently Barack Obama with his daring and ultimately vindicated decision to send the Navy SEALs into Pakistan to kill bin Laden in 2011. But Bergen has managed to add a useful bit of specificity to the indictment of Bush. The administration’s inability to head off the 9/11 attacks was not, as so often described, an “intelligence failure.” The CIA issued more than forty warnings to the president and his team in the first eight months of 2001, Bergen notes. There was also plenty of open source information indicating the likelihood of an Al-Qaeda attack on the United States; it was known that operatives connected to the group had contemplated using hijacked airliners as weapons. Bergen argues that the Bush administration later tried to prevent the 9/11 Commission from publishing its findings because it feared they would reveal the full scope of its negligence.

Yet Bush advisors like National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld —“unreconstructed Cold War warriors,” Bergen calls them—simply couldn’t comprehend how a non-state group like al-Qaeda could pose a major national security threat to the United States. Just days after 9/11, Rumsfeld chided a group of generals and officials at the Pentagon: “Don’t over-elevate the importance of Al Qaeda.” On a separate occasion, he observed that “[t]here just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan”—a comment with ominous implications. One country over-endowed with good targets was, of course, Iraq. The neocons in Bush Jr.’s orbit had long had Saddam Hussein in their sights, many of them believing that the president’s father had failed to finish the job during the Gulf War in 1991. The drive to topple Saddam was, to use Bergen’s elegant phrase, “untethered to any facts,” but that didn’t stop the Bushies from wanting to eliminate him anyway.

One of the leitmotifs of Bergen’s story is the seemingly perennial presidential disinterest in “the day after.” It turns out that toppling tyrants is far easier than preparing for life after their demise. The Bush team was famously unconcerned about all those pesky details of administering Iraq after Saddam’s removal; that failure to do the hard work of managing America’s conquest would result in a prolonged and expensive occupation. Obama, for his part, later said that one of his greatest regrets was allowing the destruction of Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Libya without thinking through what might follow. Bergen is quite harsh on Biden, who, he argues, didn’t have to accept the unfavorable Afghanistan withdrawal deal with the Taliban, bequeathed to him by first-term Trump, and contributed to the chaos that ensued by publicly announcing a deadline for the U.S. pullout.

But all of this pales in comparison to the deeds of Donald Trump—the man who notoriously boasted in The Art of the Deal that “I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.” Trump clearly gave little advance thought to the consequences of the war against Iran he launched on February 28; American military power would simply cow the Iranians into submission (shades of George W.’s “shock and awe”). That Tehran might actually fight back, leveraging its drones and missiles to strike sensitive blows at U.S. bases and allies throughout the region, doesn’t appear to have occurred to him—as if Ukraine hadn’t just spent the past four years giving a masterclass in how a smaller power might use precisely those tools to defy a much bigger one. That the Iranians could easily shut the Strait of Hormuz, striking a blow to global trade, was widely known in advance of the war. Bergen cites the case of Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, whose resignation two weeks into the war “dramatically undercut claims by Trump’s senior officials about the imminence of the threat posed by Iran,” since Kent’s position gave him access to high-level intelligence.

Did we learn anything at all from the Global War on Terror? Perhaps. Bergen suggests that it took us at least a decade and a half after 9/11 to properly understand how best to counter the jihadist threat. During the international fight against ISIS that began in 2014, both Obama and Trump saw in practice that the best policy was an approach summed up by the motto “Go Light, Go Long.” Relatively small numbers of U.S. advisers on the ground, working closely with Syrian and Iraqi allies and supported by American air power, proved more than a match for the fanatical fighters of the would-be Caliphate. It was also sustainable, both financially and militarily.

Even so, that’s little consolation for the colossal mistakes that have cost so many lives and so much treasure. Bergen’s withering portrait of stupidity and blindness at the highest levels of the U.S. government offers little consolation. One can only imagine how long we, and the rest of the world, will end up paying for Trump’s and Hegseth’s blunders in the Middle East. Bergen sums up twenty-five years of the war on terror in a fitting aside: “Incompetence,” he notes, “is generally a better explanation of most human activity than conspiracy.”