What the 9/11 Memorials Missed, and What They Revealed

Everyone who was alive at the time of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath remembers the formula: if we do this or that to alter our way of life, then “the terrorists will have won.” It started out as an utterly earnest phrase, making a serious point about preserving the things that most deserve defending in the American political system. The venerable civil-libertarian Times columnist Anthony Lewis expressed what has become the classic formulation in a summer 2004 edition of Mother Jones, “If we allow our liberties to be trampled,” he wrote, “the terrorists will have won.” But as the immanence of the terrorist threat waned, and a sense of complacency began to set it, the phrase became the butt of endless jokes. “If I can’t go out and eat a Big Mac today, the terrorists will have won”: that was the pattern. The smirking talk-show host David Letterman got in his two cents: “If I can’t text inappropriate photos then the terrorists have won.” Or there was the comedian Ellen DeGeneres, host of the Emmy Awards in November of 2001: “We’re told to go on living our lives as usual, because to do otherwise is to let the terrorists win, and really, what would upset the Taliban more than a gay woman wearing a suit in front of a room full of Jews?”

Never very funny to begin with, these lines have taken on a whole new aspect in the past few weeks. For by any reasonable measure the terrorists are now winning. The very forces that protected al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and permitted them to plan attacks on the United States are now back in power, savoring what they see as a second great victory for militant Islam, following its previous triumph over the Russians, a success so complete that the Soviet Union itself soon thereafter would cease to exist, collapsing as rapidly as the Twin Towers would collapse a dozen years later. It would be hard to imagine a more satisfying and encouraging confirmation of a divinely ordained world-historical destiny. The forces now in charge in Afghanistan have every reason to think that there is a holy wind at their back, and they are likely in the fullness of time—which might come in mere months—to make their country into even more of a haven for international terrorist groups than it was twenty years ago.

In addition, they have won this war in a way that has brought unprecedented shame and disgrace upon the United States in the process. What were our leaders thinking? Was it that they were weary of a seemingly endless commitment to a seemingly impossible task, anxious “to go on living our lives as usual,” and eager to generate a grand photo-op finish to the Afghan adventure that (it was thought) would provide a symbolic bookend to the whole matter, and redound to the benefit of a struggling Biden presidency? In any event, our leaders deliberately timed the chaotic withdrawal of American troops and personnel to correspond with the 9/11 attacks of 2001, the very events that put the Afghan tragedy into motion. In departing, we left behind for the use of our enemies some $85-$90 billion of advanced military equipment, an amount more than the annual military budget of all but two countries, the United States and China, and we abandoned an unknown but not insignificant number of our own people and vulnerable Afghan allies who had trusted American leaders to stand with them and for them.