14 Moments From the War on Terror

If the New York Times says so, it must be true. Or so went the groupthink that appears to have dominated America’s leading political decision makers, who in October 2002 voted in favor of waging war on Iraq based on the now-debunked theory that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction. Despite the fact that about 200,000 Iraqi civilians died as a direct consequence of the war that followed, many of the politicians who voted for the invasion and occupation remain influential today: Chuck Schumer? He’s currently Senate majority leader. John Kerry now serves as the United States’ Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. Joe Biden? Well, we all know how it worked out for him.

2 - Iraq Calamity

Sure, millions of people across the world in 2002 and early 2003 protested the invasion of Iraq. But the release in 2010 of a 2007 video that showed a U.S. military helicopter gunning down a dozen Iraqis ended any hopes the mission had of winning “hearts and minds” anywhere. “They [the coalition] confused their own sense of goodness with an inevitable victory,” reflects Canadian reporter Patrick Graham, who was in Baghdad at the time of the invasion in March 2003. “Add to that a huge amount of money and a military industrial complex that is able to feed off a foreign policy system and you get a war where no one is incentivized to admit that they have lost until it is just way too late.”

3 - Torture Tactics

“Enhanced interrogation techniques.” That phrase, seen by many as polite parlance for torture, will forever be connected to the war on terror and how it affected America’s reputation as the leader of the free world. The pictures of U.S. guards abusing naked prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 shocked the world. And while then-President George W. Bush said the U.S. “does not torture people,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s notorious 2002 memo stated people could be interrogated for 20 hours straight, and Bush said he didn’t consider waterboarding torture.

4 - You’re Being Followed

Edward Snowden’s revelations of global mass spying by America’s National Security Agency in 2013 have fundamentally changed our notions of surveillance, online security and our trust in what democratic nations can — and are — doing. China and a host of authoritarian states might do it more openly, but can we be sure that the NSA isn’t snooping on us as we’re sending an email or speaking on Zoom? What’s more, in a world in which cookies and a host of other tracking devices are used to map your every move, the more you try to protect your privacy, the more suspicious you’ll appear to government agents.

5 - Bin Laden’s Killing

We all know that photo. President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a dozen other officials gathered in the White House Situation Room as a team of U.S. Navy SEALS conducted the raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that finally killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. Obama said no video of the raid or photos of the body would be released because “that’s not who we are. We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies.” Bin Laden was buried at sea. A day before the mission — after Obama had authorized it — he was at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner poking fun at Donald Trump and his “birther” conspiracy theories. Cool as a cucumber.

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If you think the war on terror never affected you personally, just remember that you now have to take off your shoes and put them through a scanner at most airports. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, British terrorist Richard Reid tried to ignite bombs in his shoes on a flight to Miami. The so-called shoe bomber was restrained and is now serving life in prison, but the incident forever changed air travel. These days, you need to arrive at the airport much earlier than in the pre-9/11 era and be prepared to take off your belt and jacket.

2 - Arabic, the New Russian

Sitting in a cafe in Syria’s capital, Damascus, in 2008 [Stephen Starr, OZY Senior Editor, was based there at the time], it was impossible not to wonder how 30 years earlier, international relations students would have found themselves in Kyiv or Bratislava. After 9/11, Arabic became the must-know language for anyone keen to join the U.S. State Department. Between 2002 and 2013 in the U.S., the number of students enrolled in Arabic courses at universities tripled to more than 32,000. As the war on terror stretched from months into years, thousands of students took off for college campuses in Amman, Cairo and Damascus.

3 - Gulf Rising

From specks in the desert to regional superpowers. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have seen their diplomatic stock reach stratospheric levels due to the war on terror. Qatar made its name through the government-owned Al-Jazeera news agency, which broadcast some of the most important footage of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Media aside, Qatar is home to the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the UAE also spotted an opportunity to pursue its goal of becoming a regional powerhouse. The country of nearly 10 million people has sent military forces to Yemen, Libya and Somalia, funded militants in the Syrian conflict and last year spent almost $20 billion on defense.

4 - Drones Change the Game

When Obama authorized the use of an armed drone to assassinate an American citizen outside of a war zone for the first time, the rules of engagement changed forever. A radical cleric and al-Qaida figure, Anwar al-Awlaki’s death on Sept. 30, 2011, prompted significant criticism from rights groups that claimed the incident amounted to an extrajudicial killing. It set a precedent. While the government has largely held off on killing its own citizens in such a way since then, thousands of citizens of other countries haven’t been as lucky.

5 - Who Benefited?

Someone always does. In Afghanistan, the U.S. government spent $300 million a day. Since 2001, America has spent $83 billion — more than four times Afghanistan’s GDP — on training and equipping the Afghan army. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have been so lucrative for top weapons manufacturers that had you bought $10,000 worth of stock in the top companies in 2001, you’d be sitting on close to $100,000 today. Other beneficiaries of the war on terror include private military contractors like Blackwater.

Since the fall of Kabul, the Taliban seem to have swapped their trusty Russian Kalashnikovs for American M16 rifles. While it’s unclear how much military equipment the U.S. left behind, we know that apart from small arms, Humvees and mine-resistant vehicles have also fallen into Taliban hands. The militants could now sell the weapons on the black market. They could add to the arsenal of Pakistani terrorists, Kashmiri separatists or even the Islamic State group — just as they did in Iraq some years ago. But perhaps the most dangerous weapon terror groups, from the Middle East to Mozambique and Southeast Asia to the Sahel, have gained from the rushed U.S. exit from Afghanistan is the inspiration they’ll take from the U.S. “defeat.”

2 - Taliban — Important US Ally?

America’s intervention in Iraq had the unintended effect of creating the Islamic State group. Now, an offshoot of that terror outfit, the Islamic State Khorasan, or ISK, is showing it’s capable of major attacks like the one that killed 13 U.S. troops and close to 200 Afghans at Kabul’s airport last month. And that’s spawning unlikely cooperation between Washington and the Taliban, foes that fought bitterly against each other for two decades. The Taliban and the ISK are enemies. Biden has noted the Taliban “are not good guys,” but has said that working with the Taliban is a “matter of mutual self-interest. ” Can they really put their differences aside in the face of the joint threat?

3 - Forever Prisoners

As Kabul fell last month, a Taliban leader sitting in what had until recently been former President Ashraf Ghani’s office, said he’d spent years in the Guantanamo Bay U.S. prison camp. The stunning turnaround begs the question: Why is Guantanamo still open years after former President Barack Obama promised to close it? The prison has, perhaps more than anything else, sullied America’s reputation as an upholder of justice and due process. Many of the nearly 800 detainees that have passed through it were never charged and are never expected to face trial. Thirty-nine remain at the base in Cuba, and while Biden had been taking steps to close it, the Taliban’s resurgence could mean Gitmo’s “forever prisoners” remain, despite the end of the “forever war.”

4 - No More World Policeman

It’s not just the Afghan war that’s ended. Biden has made it clear that America’s withdrawal from Kabul was also “about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries” entirely. Will this mean a more inward-looking America? Due to the debacle in Iraq and the Taliban victory in Afghanistan, “the U.S. has lost out badly at a diplomatic level,” Jasmine Opperman, a counterterrorism expert based in South Africa, tells OZY.

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