9/11, 25 years on: The terror threat is not gone and US is struggling with the lesson
While there is an attempt by Left-Liberals to forget 9/11 and focus on more mundane issues, the US is again playing with fire and hopefully won't be burned.
Twenty five years after the 9/11 attacks in New York City, the threat of terror remains present and the United States is grappling with the lessons learned from that fateful day. Despite the terror attack killing 2,977 innocent civilians and the 19 individuals who carried out the assault, some argue that it was simply a black swan event orchestrated by Saudi, UAE, Egyptian, and Lebanese extremists and their Pakistani logistical planners.
The focus on the Wahhabi Islamic ideology that inspired the attack by Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden has been largely overlooked. At the time of the attacks, the US was a dominant global power, following the defeat of the Soviet Union. The western media and American legislators had once celebrated bin Laden as a freedom fighter.
Pakistan, once a trusted ally of the US, had betrayed Washington by allowing the attacks to be planned on both sides of the Durand Line. Bin Laden was eventually killed in Pakistan in 2011, while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed remains in US custody. The US initially supported the ultra-conservative Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 1996, only to evict it when they discovered the presence of bin Laden.
The US occupied Afghanistan for two decades, withdrawing in 2021 following the rise of the Taliban. However, Pakistan's de-facto military ruler, Field Marshal Asim Muni, remains a close friend of President Donald Trump. Despite being on opposite sides of the Islamic world, Iran provided safe passage to top Al Qaeda terrorists to cross into Iraq, where they later morphed into ISIS and caused further harm in Iraq and Syria post-2014.
Today, affiliates of Al Qaeda and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) continue to murder innocent people in Africa in the name of political Islam, with little retaliation from the global community. The question remains whether anything has changed 25 years after the 9/11 terror attacks. Pan-Islamic jihadist groups continue to operate with impunity in Pakistan, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, supported by states like Pakistan, Iran, and covertly funded by Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.
The extremist ideologies of Wahhabbi, Salafi Ahl al-Hadith still exist, and de-radicalization programs have not proven effective. While the US believes in its invincibility and disrupts regimes without ensuring good governance, countries like India must be vigilant in countering terrorism, as Pakistan harbors terror proxies operating from Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.
Despite attempts by left-liberals to forget 9/11 and focus on more mundane issues, the US is once again playing with fire. Shishir Gupta, an executive editor and journalist at Hindustan Times, has reported extensively on national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy, and geopolitics.
Written by urgent.news from Hindustan Times - World News's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
