Twenty-five years after 9/11, did the Islamists or the US win the war on terror?

The scale of the catastrophe remains without parallel. The pious Muslims of al-Qaeda murdered nearly 3,000 civilians, including hundreds of police and firefighters, in the deadliest terrorist attack in history. They injured thousands more and caused billions of dollars of damage.

The American president was less than nine months into his first term. George W Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative” on centrist issues such as education. When the second plane struck, Bush was in Texas, reading to preschoolers.

Dictators can choose the hour and method of their retaliation. But democracies demand revenge. 9/11 made Bush a war president. Three days later, he addressed the rescue workers in the smoking ruins of “Ground Zero” through a bullhorn.

“I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people – the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” he promised.

“USA! USA!” they shouted back.

Ground Zero became the launch pad for the Global War on Terrorism.

Just as Osama bin Laden hoped, the atrocities forced the USA to respond by bombing and invading Muslim societies, and by linking its security abroad to Israel.

The longest war in American history began little more than two weeks after 9/11, when the first special forces arrived in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Twenty years passed before the Biden administration admitted defeat and passed Afghanistan back to the Taliban.

The Biden administration called that the end of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). But the war is not over.

President Bush signed the Congressional license that made it possible, the Authorisation for the Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, on September, 18, 2001. It remains in force.

Today, the American giant remains pinned down in a world-spanning “forever war” with Islamic extremism. A perpetual counter-insurgency campaign of surveillance and drone strikes, with intermittent hot wars such as the current Third Gulf War.

Bin Laden failed to split America’s alliances with Israel and the Gulf states, but Europe opted out of the GWOT. The Islamists won big, though, by making the democratisation of the world look like an American delusion.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the security blowback restricted the democratic freedoms that the GWOT was supposed to secure.

Imagine that you are back on September 9, 2001, in the America where gangs of foreign hijackers could overstay their visas and carry bladed weapons through airport security. Now go forward 25 years to September 2026 and ask who won the GWOT.

Money from the Gulf still washes through Washington, DC. Only now it’s Qatari rather than Saudi money that funds extremism and corrupts American policy.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Pakistani who allegedly masterminded 9/11, is still in Guantanamo Bay awaiting trial.

On August 29, a military judge dismissed the confession that Mohammed gave to FBI agents in 2007. The judge reasoned that Mohammed might have been intimidated by years of CIA interrogations. His trial is now set for June 2028.

It took ten years to kill Osama bin Laden. US Navy SEALs ran him to ground at Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011.

Abbottabad is a garrison town, the Pakistani equivalent of Aldershot. Bin Laden lived there undisturbed for six years, only a mile away from Pakistan’s premier military academy. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which supported the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan before 9/11, insisted that it knew nothing. An official Pakistani enquiry exonerated the ISI on grounds of “gross incompetence.”

But Asad Durrani, who directed the ISI from 1990 to 1992, told al-Jazeera in 2015 that it was “possible” that the ISI did not know that the world’s most wanted man was living in an ISI stronghold, but it was “more probable” that they did know, and traded him with the Obama administration in the hope of bringing “the Afghan problem to an end.”

The Afghan war ended in 2021 with the most embarrassing American retreat since Vietnam. Millions of dollars and thousands of American lives later, Pakistan is still a failed state with nuclear weapons. Afghanistan is still a sump of tribal viciousness and Taliban cruelty.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was sold dishonestly and executed incompetently. The American architects of the Iraq war were forced to retire from public life as “neocons”, pursued by popular disgust. Somehow, their British partners are still taken seriously.

Tony Blair remains a discreet presence in the affairs of the Labour Party. His publicist Alastair Campbell, who “sexed up” the “dodgy dossier” that convinced the British public to join the war, is a popular podcaster with Rory Stewart, who served as a deputy governor of an Iraqi province in 2003 and 2004.

The initial American withdrawal of 2011 was reversed in 2014 when ISIS took over parts of Iraq. The final withdrawal of American troops is scheduled for 30 September 2026. But the GWOT’s failures will continue to follow America and Europe westwards.

The rise of the barbarian kingdom of the Islamic State was a direct consequence of the Iraq war. So was the Syrian civil war which broke out in 2011 and ended with a Turkish-backed Islamist presiding in Damascus. So was the tide of asylum seekers that came to Europe from the Middle East. The negative consequences are now remaking European society and politics for the worst.

So was the rise of Donald Trump as the anti-establishment candidate who promised to end the “forever wars”.

So was Iran filling a regional vacuum with an empire of terrorism, the Obama administration’s harebrained attempt to license Iranian nukes as the price of escaping the Middle East, and the chickens coming home to roost in the multi-front war that broke out on October 7.

Will Trump be remembered for the Abraham Accords, or as the president whose confrontation with Iran revived the GWOT in a heightened key? Both were attempts to extricate America from the Middle East.

The GWOT globalised Islamism without winning the war. The conflict with Islamism is now internalised in Western societies.

As soon as it was decently possible, left-leading media amplified the Islamist narrative that Israel is a key source of the West’s woes.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organisation of al-Qaeda, Hamas and ISIS, still operates in America and Europe.

Formally in Europe, and informally in blue-state America, free speech is restricted by Islamist intimidation and the complicity of governments that are frightened of being called “Islamophobic”.

You are still taking your shoes off at the airport. You are now lightly irradiated at security in case you have an explosive device in your body or under your burka. You still undergo “random” searches and swabs because targeting the likeliest suspects would be “profiling.”

There has been no second Islamist attack on American soil on the scale of 9/11. The nightmare scenario, a dirty bomb smuggled through the ports or driven across the Canadian or Mexican borders, has not happened.

This is not because of the “security kabuki” at domestic airports. America hardened its airports against the world after 9/11. The PATRIOT Act licenced a 24/7 domestic surveillance system.

The predicted wave of attacks on American Muslims never happened after 9/11. But Islamist terrorism became a constant presence in American life. Foiled plots barely make headlines anymore. Successful attacks are usually the work of single individuals or small cells.

Though 19 Arab nationals committed the 9/11 attacks, a New America report from 2021 found that “every jihadist who conducted a lethal attack inside the United States since 9/11 was a citizen or legal resident except one who was in the US as part of the US-Saudi military training partnership.”

Faisal Shahzad, who turned his SUV into a truck bomb and parked it in Times Square in 2010, was born in Pakistan and became an American citizen. The bomb failed to detonate.

Omar Mateen, who murdered 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016, was born in New York to Afghan immigrants.

Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the US Army veteran who killed 14 and injured dozens with a rented truck in New Orleans on New Year’s Day 2025, was raised Christian and converted to Islam.

As Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born preacher who became al-Qaeda’s leader in the Arabian peninsula, said in 2010, “Jihad is becoming as American as apple pie.”

From 2014 on, foreign money seeded a campus intifada against Israel and Jews.

The temporary concrete barriers that were placed around synagogues in New York City are still there.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic mayor of New York City, is a Muslim who rejects Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and promotes the lie that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza.

The Democratic nominee for US Senate Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, is a smooth-tongued “anti-Zionist” who campaigned with Hasan Piker, who said in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11”.

Like a stopped clock, the Republicans’ isolationist wing was validated both sooner and later. The rise of the “podcast Right” that blames Israel and the Jews for America’s failures is just the latest symptom of the blowback blame-game at home, and of America the stumbling giant abroad.

So tell me, who won the 9/11 wars?