How 9/11 turned a terrorist attack into a generation of war

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Americans watched in horror as hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. Less than a month later, the US went to war in Afghanistan. Two years after that, it invaded Iraq.

What began as an attack by Al-Qaeda would come to reshape US foreign policy, the Middle East, and the way Islam was discussed around the world.

A quarter of a century later, September 11 still casts a long shadow over American public life. Al-Qaeda’s responsibility for the attacks has long been established, but the edges of the story remain blurred. Documents remained classified for years and only emerged piece by piece; lawsuits dragged on; questions lingered over who might have known more, who might have helped, and how far the web surrounding the hijackers actually extended. In the gaps between what was proven, what remained secret, and what was merely suspected, conspiracy theories flourished – but so did genuine political and legal questions that America has never quite managed to put to rest.

Nowhere has that shadow fallen more heavily than on Saudi Arabia; 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and for decades, victims’ families, lawyers, and advocacy groups have pressed for greater disclosure about possible links between people associated with Saudi institutions and some of the attackers. The result is a peculiar political afterlife of 9/11. Even as Washington and Riyadh have remained strategic partners, questions surrounding the attacks have repeatedly resurfaced whenever the relationship with the kingdom comes under scrutiny.

Under former President Joe Biden, the issue returned to public attention when his administration ordered a new review and declassification of government records related to 9/11, following sustained pressure from victims’ families. The Saudi question also became entangled with a broader political reassessment of Washington’s relationship with Riyadh following the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In that sense, September 11 left behind more than a settled account of a terrorist attack. It left a long political shadow – one that continued to affect how Americans view particular Arab states, their governments, and eventually, the Muslim world.

The architecture of suspicion

The more immediate consequence of September 11, however, was broader than the hunt for those responsible. The attacks changed the conceptual framework through which the US understood Islam itself.

After 9/11, the country needed explanations: Why did it happen, what produced Islamist violence, and how could another attack be prevented? The American system responded in a characteristically American way: It went looking for expertise. Government agencies poured money into universities, professional associations, and think tanks, demanding explanations – and quickly.

But there was an almost paradoxical mismatch between the question and some of the intellectual tools available to answer it. Many of the scholars being asked to make sense of Islam, political Islam, and jihadist violence built their expertise studying religion in a different context: Christianity in the US, including Christian fundamentalism and its relationship with political extremism.

To Grigory Lukyanov, a research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and deputy dean at Russia’s State Academic University for the Humanities, the episode illustrates something larger about the American response to 9/11: Confronted with an unfamiliar threat and under enormous pressure to produce answers quickly, institutions reached for intellectual tools they already possessed.

“You needed ideas, you needed solutions, you needed an understanding of how to solve the problem,” Lukyanov said. “Money was given to scholars of religion, quick results were demanded, and existing analytical frameworks were transferred onto Islam.” 

Islam increasingly became something to be categorized in security terms. 

A movement classified as ‘moderate’ might be treated as a potential partner; one categorized as ‘radical’ could become a target of surveillance, sanctions, or counterterrorism operations, but the consequences quickly moved beyond policy and into everyday life. In September 2001, 28% of Americans said they had become more suspicious of people of Middle Eastern descent; in March 2002, 25% of Americans said Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence (now, 25 years later, it’s 51%).

For Lukyanov, the resulting distortions were almost built into the speed and structure of the response. “It is difficult to search for alternatives in counterfactual history,” he said. “The attack had happened. What could the United States do – simply not conduct a War on Terror? Retreat into something like the Monroe Doctrine, recoil from what had happened and accept defeat? That was almost impossible to imagine.”

The US of 2001 was at the height of its post-Cold War power, the Russian expert said. The Soviet Union disappeared a decade earlier; China had not yet emerged as a peer economic competitor; Washington possessed unmatched military, financial, and political reach. September 11 was therefore interpreted not only as a terrorist atrocity, but as a challenge to American global leadership.

“Not responding was impossible,” Lukyanov said. “The question is that the response was built on the experience, analytical frameworks, decision-making patterns and limitations that American political elites had at that moment.”

America’s road to endless war

If the securitization of Islam was one consequence of September 11, the most visible was measured in soldiers, bases, and wars. Yet here as well, 9/11 was less a beginning than an acceleration.

The US was hardly a newcomer to the Middle East in 2001. Its involvement expanded dramatically after the Cold War and the 1990-91 Gulf War. The US had troops and military facilities across the region, protected the Gulf monarchies, enforced no-fly zones over Iraq, supported Israel, and remained indispensable to Arab-Israeli diplomacy. By the end of the 1990s, American primacy in the region was difficult to contest.

“The United States began sinking into the Middle Eastern swamp long before September 11,” Lukyanov said. “There were essentially no other external players, and almost no major conflict or problem in the region could be resolved without the participation of Washington.”

September 11 was therefore not the moment America entered the Middle East. It was, in Lukyanov’s words, a crescendo – the moment an already extensive political and military commitment became something larger and far more difficult to control.

Less than a month after the attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan to destroy Al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban government that had sheltered it. The initial campaign was remarkably swift. By December, the Taliban regime had collapsed. What followed was not. The US would remain in Afghanistan for nearly 20 years, its longest war, losing more than 2,400 service members as it tried to build a new political order. It ended in August 2021, with the Taliban sweeping back into Kabul.

Five years later, Taliban fighters patrol the capital in American-supplied Humvees, carrying American weapons and wearing American tactical gear. Around $7 billion worth of US-funded military equipment remained in Afghanistan after the collapse of the forces the US spent two decades building.

Destroying one enemy, creating another

Then came Iraq.

Unlike Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion was not presented as war against the organization that carried out the September 11 attacks. The administration of George W. Bush argued that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction (which were never found) and presented Iraq as part of a broader post-9/11 security threat. But by then, the invasion had already removed the Iraqi state’s leadership, dissolved much of its coercive apparatus, and opened a political vacuum at the center of the Arab world.

One consequence of the US invasion of Iraq can still be felt today, Lukyanov argues, pointing to the ongoing exchange of strikes between Iran and US forces across the region.

“It was the American invasion of Iraq, prompted by the 9/11 policies, that created the conditions for a geopolitical conflict in that country, escalating the geopolitical standoff between the United States and Iran,” Lukyanov adds. “It was precisely because of this that the United States significantly increased its support for Israel and its policies.”

Hussein’s fall destroyed a regime that brutally dominated Iraq for decades, but it also removed one of the principal Arab counterweights to Iran. Iraq’s long-suppressed Shia majority acquired unprecedented political power, while many Sunnis who occupied privileged positions under the old order suddenly found themselves marginalized.

The dismantling of the Iraqi Army and Baathist state structures left hundreds of thousands of armed and militarily trained men without a place in that order. Insurgency spread and sectarian violence followed. A new generation of jihadists that came into that landscape, now known as ISIS, built itself amid the occupation and the Sunni insurgency. By 2014, ISIS seized Mosul and proclaimed a caliphate across large parts of Iraq and Syria.

The friends America abandoned

The War on Terror did not only transform America’s enemies, it also transformed its friendships.

Across the Arab world, authoritarian governments quickly discovered the political value of becoming indispensable to America’s new struggle. Tunisia, Sudan, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, and several Gulf monarchies expanded counterterrorism cooperation with the US, while governments increasingly presented domestic repression as part of the same fight against extremism. The distinction between jihadists and non-violent Islamist opponents could become dangerously elastic. Organizations that threatened the regime politically could be folded into a much broader security problem.

For aging authoritarian systems, the new order offered an opportunity. Lukyanov argues that some regimes came to believe that cooperation against a common enemy would buy them a kind of political absolution. “The War on Terror gave them the illusion that, by acting against a common enemy together with the United States, they would receive forgiveness for everything that had happened in the past.”

Few countries tested that proposition as dramatically as Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi spent decades as an adversary of Washington. But he was also an enemy of the jihadists seeking to overthrow him. After 9/11, this suddenly gave Tripoli and Washington something to talk about. Libya shared intelligence on Al-Qaeda and other Islamist militants with Western services; in 2003, Gaddafi renounced terrorism and agreed to dismantle his weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Sanctions were progressively lifted, diplomatic relations restored, and in 2006, the US removed Libya from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.

For a time, the bargain appeared to work. A ruler once treated as an international pariah reinvented himself as a counterterrorism partner. Washington, meanwhile, gained intelligence cooperation and the dismantling of Libya’s unconventional weapons programs without another war.

But there was a catch. Cooperation abroad did not require meaningful liberalization at home. Libya remained brutally authoritarian even as relations with Washington improved; elsewhere, the counterterrorism imperative similarly gave security states additional room to operate. In Egypt, emergency laws allowed thousands to be detained without fair trials, while Washington tolerated serious abuses by governments it relied upon for counterterrorism cooperation. 

Then, a decade after September 11, the bargain began to come apart when uprisings began in Tunisia in late 2010, and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak resigned after nearly 30 years in power. And in Libya, the reversal was even more extraordinary: Gaddafi – the former enemy who dismantled his weapons programs, shared intelligence on jihadists, and rebuilt relations with the West – faced an uprising of his own. NATO intervened against his forces, and in October 2011, Gaddafi was killed.

The political vacuum produced another irony, Lukyanov said. For decades, some Arab governments portrayed Islamism as one of the principal dangers from which their rule protected both their own societies and the West. Once several of these governments fell, however, Islamist movements proved to be among the best-organized political forces left standing. Ennahda won Tunisia’s first post-revolutionary election; in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged as the dominant electoral force and its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won the presidency. “In the end, in both Egypt and Tunisia, for example, movements that had provided Al-Qaeda with a social and political support base came to power,” Lukyanov said.

In the places where revolutions did not produce functioning political systems, the circle became darker still. Libya descended into fragmentation and civil war; Yemen collapsed into a regional conflict; Syria became the battlefield in which local rebellion, state repression, regional competition, and transnational jihadism converged. Groups linked to Al-Qaeda, and eventually ISIS, found new territory in the wreckage.

When the War on Terror came home

Six days after the attacks, Bush visited a Washington mosque and declared that “Islam is peace,” seeking to draw a line between the perpetrators and millions of ordinary Muslims. On the ground, however, the backlash was already well underway.

Anti-Muslim hate crimes surged from just 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001 – a more than seventeen-fold increase. Another 49 assaults and 104 incidents targeting places of worship were reported in the first week after 9/11 alone. In Chicago alone, the number of reported anti-Muslim or anti-Arab hate crimes jumped from four in all of 2000 to 51 in just the three months from September to November 2001. 

The effect was measurable within Muslim communities themselves; 57% of Muslim Americans said they had experienced some form of bias or discrimination since the attacks, and 48% said their lives had changed for the worse. Yet the response was not uniformly hostile; 79% also said they had experienced an act of kindness or support from friends or colleagues of other faiths.

The consequences went beyond the immediate backlash. The security architecture built in the aftermath of 9/11 also expanded the reach and militarization of law enforcement. By 2020, nearly 65% of the roughly 18,000 US law enforcement agencies had received military equipment through the Pentagon’s 1033 program, such as weapons, ammunition, and tactical armored vehicles.

“If we return to the question of how Islam and the Islamic world have changed, Islam as a teaching has not changed,” Lukyanov stresses. “Nor have the borders of Muslim states changed. What has changed, however, is the position of Muslim communities in Western countries and in countries outside Muslim-majority regions.”

A quarter of a century later, the legacy of 9/11 extends far beyond the attacks themselves. Not only the US, but the world around it changed: Wars reshaped the Middle East politics (though did not change the region’s borders), new extremist movements emerged, regional rivalries deepened, and Muslim communities in the West faced greater suspicion and scrutiny. In that sense, perhaps the most consequential story of 9/11 for the Muslim world is not what happened on that day, but what followed in response.