Can it really be a quarter of a century since 9/11? On one level it seems so fresh in the memory – the images, the stories, the sheer horror of it – that it can hardly be that long. But for all that, the days before September 11, 2001 – the years, even the decades – now feel like another era altogether.
Think about it this way. The Second World War broke out only 21 years after the end of the First World War. 9/11 is further away from us today than the First World War was in September 1939. Back then, on September 10, 2001, we were living in a world in which one of the main debates was how large the “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War would be and how we could spend the boon that was heading into our coffers. Here in Britain, foreign policy meant Robin Cook articulating his “ethical” approach and Tony Blair schmoozing his fellow EU leaders. Our horizons were smaller even than in the immediate post-Second World War years, as we no longer needed even to worry about the Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact.
The odd book or article would occasionally be published on the rise of political Islam, but the authors were usually dismissed as nutters or obsessives. Al-Qaeda was a name one read in the further reaches of the foreign pages of a newspaper, and the Muslim Brotherhood was barely even acknowledged as something to worry about on campus.
That was, of course, a highly Anglocentric, even Americacentric, perspective. For anyone interested in the Middle East – and in Israel’s security – political Islamism and Islamist terror were all too real. Israel was already living through the fight for survival that had yet to explode in the West.
There is now much focus on Osama bin Laden’s antagonism to the US and Saudi Arabia. But it’s often forgotten that he attributed this to the US’s military, financial, and political backing of Israel, describing Israel's creation and presence as an occupation of Palestinian land. In statements such as his 2004 video and his infamous Letter to the American People (which the Guardian notoriously chose to run as a by-lined article), bin Laden tied 9/11 directly to US policies in the Middle East, citing Israel's actions in Lebanon (such as the 1982 war) and the displacement of Palestinians. He repeatedly stated that American citizens would not be safe from attacks as long as their government supported Israel: "America will never dream of security unless we will have it in reality in Palestine."
But to our narcissistic politics and discussions, that was all seen before 9/11 as merely – as Chamberlain put it in another context in 1938 – a quarrel in a far-away country, between people of whom we know nothing.
All that changed 25 years ago today, when two planes flew into the World Trade Centre, another crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth was diverted by its passengers to an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The public may have barely heard of Osama bin Laden, but he and his organisation were well known to the security services, because al-Qaeda had already committed a series of major terrorist attacks outside of the US.
In February 1993 a truck bomb exploded in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Centre in New York City, killing six people and injuring over 1,000. In June 1996 another truck bomb was detonated outside the US military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 US service personnel and injuring hundreds of others. In August 1998 simultaneous truck bombs targeted the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 258 people – mostly local civilians – and injuring more than 5,000 others. In October 2000 a suicide bomber in a small craft laden with explosives rammed into the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole while it was refuelling in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 US sailors and injuring 39. Many other plots were foiled, such as a plan to bomb Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on New Year's Eve 1999 which was intercepted when an al-Qaeda terrorist, Ahmed Ressam, was arrested at the Canadian-US border carrying explosives.
The extent of the al-Qaeda threat was thus already well known to the security services. So when the planes hit the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, they knew immediately who was responsible. There were two key questions: who had the capacity for such an operation, and who had the intent? There were many possibilities for each question. But there was only one realistic possibility that covered both. Bin Laden had not exactly hidden his intention to attack the US – that and his antagonism to the Saudis was the driving force of his worldview that he used to recruit supporters and operatives.
What changed on 9/11 was not that bin Laden and Islamist terror somehow emerged out of obscurity as the central threat to the West but that the threat they already posed – the real, live, horrifying danger – suddenly became known to those who had never before been aware.
And yet, when one looks back with the perspective of 25 years, the most striking conclusion of what has happened since is that we still do not take the threat posed by Islamism seriously enough. In the aftermath of 9/11 we took military action – indeed, for the first and only time Article 5 of the NATO charter was invoked, which states that an armed attack against one member in Europe or North America is considered an attack against all members. But domestically, the threat posed by radicalisation has never been treated with the seriousness it merits. Take Prevent, the government’s anti-radicalisation programme. The review carried out by Sir William Shawcross in 2023 found that Prevent had "lost its way" by focusing too much on right-wing extremism and not enough on the primary and most lethal threat: Islamist extremism.
The issue is not so much that we have spent over two decades importing terrorists and extremists – although that is true. It’s that having imported them, we have allowed them to operate almost with impunity. Astonishingly, for example, it was only in 2024 that Hizb ut-Tahrir was proscribed as a terrorist organisation – despite its work radicalising students. Other Islamist groups continue to radicalise on campus.
In mosques we allow hate preachers free rein – we even let them post their sermons online so their ideas can be more widely disseminated among Muslims. We allow hate marches – not just against Jews but against the West more generally – to do their worst, and if anyone suggests that it might not be a good idea to allow terrorist supporters to march through cities seeking to demonstrate their strength, the response is that they have a human right to protest.
If the stakes were not so vital it would be comical how little we have learnt from 9/11. In one sense, 9/11 did indeed change everything, not least because the starry-eyed view we had of the post-Cold War world was shattered. But in another, perhaps more important and more profound sense, we have still, even after 25 years, not learnt even the most basic lessons.
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