When American civil and political leaders gather at the 9/11 memorial in New York on Friday, their focus will properly be on the almost 3,000 people who were murdered in the attacks 25 years ago. But after the commemoration is over, they might also reflect on the millions of others around the world whose lives were destroyed by the United States’ response to the events of September 11th, 2001.
More than 940,000 were killed directly by post-9/11 war violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan, almost half of them civilians, according to the Costs of War project by the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. The researchers estimate indirect deaths as a result of US counterterrorism conflicts in those countries at 3.6-3.8 million, bringing the total death toll to 4.5-4.7 million.
Tens of millions of people were displaced from their homes, either abroad or within their own countries and, by May 2023, more than 7.6 million children under five in post-9/11 war zones suffered from acute malnutrition. Unexploded ordnance continues to kill and maim civilians and the environmental costs of war are reflected in places such as Falluja in Iraq, where the population has seen a 17-fold increase in birth anomalies as well as a rise in cancers and other health problems.
9/11: Could its disastrous legacy have been avoided?
Less than two weeks after the attacks, US president George W Bush addressed the joint houses of Congress, declaring that Americans’ grief had turned to anger, and anger to resolution. He identified al Qaeda as the group responsible, asserting that its goal was to remake the world and to impose its radical beliefs on people everywhere.
“Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber – a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other,” he said.
“These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their way.”
Bush issued an ultimatum to the Taliban to deliver to the US all al Qaeda leaders hiding in Afghanistan and close all their training camps. And he announced a new kind of war, a war on terror that would not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.
“We will direct every resource at our command – every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war – to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network,” he said.
“We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
Surveillance
Among the first to offer Bush his support in the war on terror was Vladimir Putin, who had become Russia’s president the previous year, offering to share intelligence on terrorist networks and to step up aid to the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s adversaries in Afghanistan. Washington and its allies duly softened their criticism of Moscow’s brutal war in the majority Muslim province of Chechnya, broadly accepting Putin’s characterisation of it as part of the global war against extremism.
Bush increased the budgets of the intelligence services by 100 per cent and set up a new department of homeland security to lead the domestic fight against terrorism. Federal agents were allowed to eavesdrop on phone calls and read emails in the US and around the world, establishing the system of potentially total surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden.
US allies in Europe followed suit, adopting new legal frameworks to restrict civil liberties in the name of counterterrorism, sharing the fruits of their snooping with the Americans.
Detention
Some European countries also co-operated in a darker and more brutal dimension of the war on terror, the system of extraordinary rendition that saw suspects captured, imprisoned and tortured in secret “black sites” around the world before being held in Guantánamo Bay without trial or any form of due process.
Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian, was 31 when he was captured in a joint CIA and FBI operation in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad in March 2002. He was taken to a black site in Thailand where he was subjected to waterboarding 83 times in a single month along with other forms of torture.
He was moved to other CIA secret sites in Poland, Lithuania, Morocco and Afghanistan before being transferred to Guantánamo Bay. The US initially claimed that he was the number three figure in al Qaeda but later admitted that he had never been a member of the organisation.
The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that all the states where he was detained, along with Britain and the US, share legal responsibility for what happened to Zubaydah. Poland, Lithuania and Britain have paid compensation but he remains at Guantánamo Bay today, along with 14 other prisoners from the war on terror, because the US claims he is too dangerous to release.
Helen Duffy, a professor of international humanitarian and human rights law who has represented Zubaydah since 2009, has described his situation as Kafkaesque.
“There is no legal basis for the detentions at Guantánamo Bay. Under international law, for there to be a lawful detention, there has to be legal grounds for that detention and basic procedural justice.
“In these cases, there are no grounds for detention provided for in law, and they have always been completely arbitrary because they deny all of the basic due process rights. Detention for life without a single charge, or any opportunity to know and challenge any evidence against you, is Kafkaesque,” she told the International Centre for Counterterrorism last year.
“The US administrations claim that ‘law of war authority’ justifies detention at Guantánamo. This relies on the notion of an ongoing global war against al Qaeda and associated terrorist groups.
“This idea of a global war with unidentified adversaries that never ends, but carries a right to detain people until it does, is an absurd and widely discredited notion. This use of ‘war’ rhetoric has provided cover for so many violations of international law for over 20 years. And this case reminds us of its terrible consequences for people like my client, whose indefinite, arbitrary detention is justified by reference to these forever wars.”
Costs
The Pentagon told Congress five years ago that the wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan cost $1.6 trillion but the Costs of War project estimates the total cost of the post-9/11 wars at about $8 trillion. This includes more than $5 trillion in direct costs, $1 trillion in homeland security spending and more than $1 trillion in interest on the borrowing to finance them.
The post-9/11 wars were funded by borrowed money and 2001 was the last year that a federal budget passed by Congress resulted in a surplus. This meant that the US entered the 2008 global financial crisis in a weak fiscal position and federal debt has ballooned since then to today’s figure of $40 trillion.
Two months after the 9/11 attacks, China joined the World Trade Organisation and gained access to the global market, a move that saw its share of the world’s exports almost double within two years. China’s economy, one seventh of the size of the US in 2001, is now the world’s second biggest and the country is now the global manufacturing hub.
Western consumers benefited from cheap Chinese imports but what was described as the China shock devastated manufacturing in America’s industrial heartlands and in similar regions in Europe. The destruction of industrial working-class communities contributed to the rise of reactionary, populist movements, including Brexit, the rise of the far right in Europe and the ascent of Donald Trump in the US.
Migration
The waves of migration caused by the post-9/11 wars also contributed to the success of ethno-nationalists in Europe, which passed another landmark this week with the victory of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Saxony-Anhalt. Much of the anti-Muslim rhetoric of today’s far right echoes the discourse after 9/11, including from former liberals such as Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis.
“There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children,” Amis said in 2006.
Many of the instruments Trump has used to enforce his domestic policy were created after 9/11, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) which was created in 2003 as part of the Department of Homeland Security. He has also used post-9/11 laws to designate drug cartels and other groups as foreign terrorist organisations, a move that enabled the use of military force in Latin America.
Last year, the Trump administration used Bush-era laws to designate four domestic “antifa” groups as foreign terrorist organisations, leading to the conviction of protesters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) of offering material support to terrorists. The designation has also allowed the FBI to run warrantless searches on US citizens’ domestic communications, although civil liberties lawyers say the surveillance is unlawful.
Law
America’s wars since 9/11 and European support for or acquiescence in its trampling over international law have undermined western claims to moral superiority over China or even Russia. As this weekend’s Brics summit in New Delhi will demonstrate, much of the rest of the world is working on alternatives to western hegemony, even if they cannot yet escape it.
The contrast between Europe’s demand for solidarity against Russian aggression in Ukraine and its lack of action over Israel’s war in Gaza has deepened global scepticism about the nature of western values. But in its disproportionate response to the atrocities of October 7th, 2023, its contempt for international humanitarian law and its dehumanisation of Palestinian civilians, Israel too has been following America’s post-9/11 playbook.
