Did the 9-11 Attacks "Work?"

Great Debates
61

I believe that Bin Laden probably feels he was 70% successful in his attacks.

If he were able to reflect on the past 8 years and determine if he would do it all over again, he would. Lets be honest, many things did not occur the way he, nor anyone else could have really predicted.

Its bad (for Bin Laden) that Afghanistan is no longer under the Taliban, Iraq is no longer under Saddam, and the eyes of the world’s military and police are now tuned in to Al-Qaeda and Islamic extremists.

However, its good for him that a culture war is firmly in place, Americans are less prosperous because of the war spending, freedom in the West is curtailed due to security and bigoted fears, and its easier to recruit followers because extremism on both sides have risen and seemed to have drowned out the moderates.

Does the good outweigh the bad? To me, it seems so because so much of the bad can be mitigated and so much of the good is really difficult to pacify. Pakistan is now the new Afghanistan, and Iraq served its purpose as a foundation for attacking Americans, training jihadists, and draining the coffers and will of the American people. And while the world now knows Al-Qaeda’s name, so too does the countless thousands of potential recruits.

To fight against the good (for Bin Laden), would take staggering amounts of patience, time, and money. How do you simply stop the culture clash that Bin Laden unleashed? Especially when countries lock up Muslims, torture them, ban their headwear, and generally make them miserable, whether justified or not, in their country of residence. The powers that governments grabbed in their haste to provide security will not be easily relinquished, if at all, and so that serves as another point for the pro-Bin Laden side

Sure there was a lot he hasn’t accomplished, but I doubt anything thinks that 9/11 itself was going to topple the Saudi kings or usher in an apocolypse on Israel. Those are tangential.

62

Feared and respected by whom? The bats which share the Afghan caves they’re hiding in?

63

Finding someone that doesn’t want to be found in an area with the terrain of Afghanistan/Pakistan, with plenty of money, while being abbetted by the local populace isn’t very easy.

OBL is definitely keeping his head down. When’s the last time he made a video recording?

64

Whether the conspiracy theorists are right or wrong (and I think it’s more likely Elvis did it) the sad thing is that it has worked. It’s obviously something psychologically shocking to the US that has never known a foreign attack. Much worse is that it’s put the fear of God into other nations that have known real war and terrorism. In the 70s and 80s. anarchist gangs and nationalist organisation - IRA, PLO, ETA etc - were planting bombs and hijacking aircraft every month or so. And nobody really cared. Maybe it was because a lot of people were still alive who’d lived through WW2 or Korea or terrorist campaigns in Palestine (yes folks, poor little Israel was founded by terrorists), Cyprus, Malaya, Kenya and of course the chaos following Indian independence, the Algerian War of Independence and God knows what else.

The truth is that the WTC attack was massive but others have been little different from what went on then except much much rarer. Yet they’ve got everybody panicked the moment they see a guy with a beard. They’ve created a whole notion about Islam drawn from Arabia and their fundamentalists and a feeling that the whole lot are one great Jihad waiting to happen. Most Muslims are no worse than Mormons and many of them far more tolerant.

We don’t even know whether a structured organisation called Al-Qaida exists or ever did. One meaning is *The Database[/i ]and it is said to have originally been a CIA list of terrorists with no known affiliation. They may not have ever been a single organised group but it suits terrorists to give the impression that they are.

Attacks in Iraq are reported as if they were on our doorstep. As many of them are aimed at other Iraqis as at the coalition forces. Afghanistan is a mess with local warlords and drug lords recruiting expendable cannon-fodder in their private feuds with each other and the government behind the disguise of Jihad. They would be happy enough to see the extreme Taliban back because the harsher the regime the more corruption on the big scale but suppression of small rivals - like The Handmaid’s Tale.

65

Well the US isn’t going to let that happen, is it? :dubious:

66

Yes, it’s hard work being president. That’s no excuse for failure.

OBL last released a message on July 12, 2009:
OBL message in Urdu transcription released

67

http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/usa/Al_Queda.htm This article says El Queda is in more than 60 countries. How will fighting in Afghanistan solve anything. When we went in because of 911 ,we accomplished all we could. Now we are just wasting lives and treasure.

68

It’s Al…not El. Your own cite says this. I’m unsure why you can’t get this simple thing, but Al and El have completely different meanings in Arabic.

Because Al Qaeda had much of it’s C&C and training facilities in Afghanistan. Seems pretty straight forward to me how this would be helpful, even if it doesn’t ‘solve’ the problem.

We went there because that’s where AQ had it’s bases and it’s largest visible presence. We are still there because so are they.

Obama would seem to disagree with you, since he is actually ramping things up there instead of winding things down. And, not that it’s a big mystery, but he’s right and you aren’t.

-XT

69

“Back” to the Stone Age?

70

Al Qaeda and Saddam were*** enemies***; they hated each other. Our toppling of Saddam was a victory for Al Qaeda. And we largely destroyed Iraqi secularism, on top of that.

71

Obviously it is a huge national wtf moment, so of course they worked.

Apparently the next logical question is who to kill. Which Bush fucked up, for debatable reasons.

How does America ‘get out’ of 9-11?

72

Meanwhile … back on planet Earth.

73

The Saudi’s are the ones who fund the extreme nut-job terrorist Wahhabist version of Islam world-wide.

74

It’s not really so much about 9/11 anymore. Events have happened and the world has moved on. We are IN Afghanistan now, and unless we want to see the whole country go tits up and back to the level it was prior to our invasion we are pretty much disposed to stay there until (hopefully) the Taliban and AQ are put down hard enough to become only a background problem in the region…and, in theory, until the Afghan government is strong enough to deal with that background problem essentially on it’s own. I’m guessing this will be a LONG time to get to this point.

However, by and large our allies in the region don’t seem quite yet ready to pull up stakes. While the war in Afghanistan is no more popular in the various NATO countries supplying troops and supplies to Afghanistan than it is in the US, there hasn’t been a massive hue and cry (yet) for the majority of those countries to cut and run. That being the case, it would be more cowardly than usual for US to do so at this stage. Obviously, Obama agrees…in fact, he is doing the opposite of pulling up stakes and getting us out of dodge. He has increased our troop levels and our commitment to the region. You might want to think about WHY he’s done that…and ponder the fact that NATO also doesn’t seem ready to call it a day yet either.

-XT

75

He was talking about the Spanish version of Al Qaeda they’re a little more laid back.

76

Lances and windmills rather than airplanes and towers, that sort of thing?

77

I suppose you can look at it that way, and if so, you’d be correct. Given hindsight though, having US troops and a puppet government in Iraq isnt exactly a good outcome of toppling Saddam. Whatever hatred Saddam may have had with Bin Laden, they were at least ideologically closer than the US and Bin Laden. Despite not being a Muslim fundamentalist, Saddam did pay them lots of lip service over the years

78

Saddam ran a secular regime in Iraq, so I don’t see how you can say that was ideologically aligned with Al Qaeda. Secular regimes in Dar al Islam seem to be an even greater affront to global Jihadists than Liberal western nations.

79

ISTM that Afghanistan has been tits up for decades. The only question now is between over-easy and sunny side up. OBL (and his backers) must be pretty callous toward Afghanistan if he counts this part of it as a success, even if we left tomorrow.

As for the ‘cut and run’ business… you may have me confused with someone else. I question whether we should have got involved in the first place, but what to do about it now is a separate issue. I’m finding it almost impossible to gather much information about the current state of affairs. I’m not prepared to dictate policy.

80

As far as I understand it getting America bogged down in Afghanistan was a primary goal of the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden surmised that Afghanistan was a place historically where Empires have gone to die, and he hope that it would be true for America.

To understand Al Qaeda one needs to understand the difference between Jihadism and Islamism. A good book on the subject is the easy to read, “How to Win a Cosmic War.”, by Reza Aslan. Jihadism is based off of the idea of a global Jihad that one fights until Islam is ascendant and ultimately victorious, where all of Dar al Islam falls under the aegis of an Islamic Caliphate (Empire). Islamism is particular to a region, it generally can be thought of as Muslim nationalism. Some groups are Jihadist like Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood. Others are Islamist, like Hamas, Lashkar-e-Toiba, and Hezbollah. An Islamist sect seeks to bring about a Muslim government in a particular nation, a Jihadist one attempts to string all Islamist struggles into a larger universal narrative of global Jihad.