9/11 led to an enormously costly war in Afghanistan. (Yes, Iraq was a bad war, but we’ll leave that out for now.)
Was a much more low-key, subtler approach - like the Israeli assassination campaign after the 1972 Munich Olympic attacks - practical? Think subtle, nonstop assassinations and targeted hit jobs on al-Qaeda day in and day out, but no huge ground force operations, no hugely expensive war, etc.
For PR, the U.S. government could have published detailed info about each assassinated terrorist on a regular basis, to give the American public the sense that justice was being done. Or was that just not enough for the public?
In retrospect, of course, simply burying our dead, reaffirming our dedication to liberty, and getting on with life as usual would have been the wiser course of action.
It’s certainly tempting to dream of much more focused intelligence and surgical strikes to disable Al-Qaeda without whipping up a backlash, but what we now know about our intelligence network in the region gives no reason to be optimistic about the efficacy of such a strategy.
The response to 9/11 was low key. The Taliban was largely defeated with only a handful of U.S. special forces personnel working with the Northern Alliance. The tribal limitias (with US air power) did most of the fighting in the initial stages of the war.
People often conflate the Iraq War with the Afghanistan War (which was the real response to 9/11).
Hell no. After 9/11 we wanted to see video coverage of shit being blown up somewhere. Anything short of that would have led to unrest in the American public and people getting voted out of office.
You can still get that PR with a low-key campaign; a few drone strikes or Tomahawks with good visual effect.
We did have this enormous, expensive military thingy, if we just let it sit there, people would be saying what the hell, why are we not using it. I seriously doubt even Al Gore could have held back on that, though I would hope he would have acted more reasonably on the home front. It would seem that al Qaeda timed their assault to an administration that would go ahead and win he war on terror for them, if Gore had been president, they might have held off on their plans.
I think not going all invasiony was possible, but once it was presented as an option, the real man option,we were done for.
Ymmv
Ok. But Iraq was the real cluster fuck. Afghanistan, I think, was actually a pretty measured response from the US and our allies considering.
The problem was that the Taliban were actively supporting AQ in Afghanistan. They had given AQ land and bases to train in, and had even included several high ranking AQ in the government itself. So, I don’t see how, short of forcing the Taliban to meet our demand of turning over a list of ranking AQ leaders and stopping all support including kicking AQ out of Afghanistan and shutting down all of their training facilities how we could have effectively done less than we did.
I doubt it would have been enough for the public, but even if it would have been it wouldn’t have been enough for our own security. We needed those AQ leaders, especially ObL basically taken out and we needed AQ in Afghanistan taken out, and the only way to do that was air strikes, missile attacks and boots on the ground. I suppose you could do this by sending in special forces teams to providing targeting for air and missile strikes against Taliban and AQ groups, especially if you didn’t care that at the time the Taliban were in charge and would have been in the major cities (thus you’d have had even more causalities). Then when/if the Taliban folded you could have let the country completely disintegrate into total chaos, as opposed to the partial meltdown it did when we invaded and the general chaos that ensued. I think it would have been a lot worse, with a hell of a lot more Afghani’s dead, but I suppose if you wanted to save even more money and US lives you could have gone this route.
Needed in what sense? How, specifically, did killing members of AQ in Afghanistan or denying them training camps in Afghanistan contribute to our security?
I’m not saying it didn’t, but I don’t think it just goes without saying.
Not in retrospect - this is EXACTLY what many of us were advocating at the time.
Giving them the breathing room to train and plan is pretty obvious (to me) a large contributing factor to the 9/11 attacks. Not giving them future opportunities to train and plan in the open, but forcing them to keep their heads down instead and destroying much of their ability to operate openly and with a nation states protection and assistance is going to be a net positive wrt security not only for the US but for others AQ might take it into their head to attack. This isn’t to say it will be a 100% guarantee that AQ won’t be able to do stuff, but I think it’s pretty clear that taking out their Afghanistan bases and forcing them to constantly look over their shoulders for an air strike or missile attack has at least stifled their ability to do much against the US and Europe and even has stifled their ability to expand in the region.
Bush made everyone happy. He told everyone to just go on with their lives AND go to war.
In retrospect, the USA should have done what Bush made fun of. We should have used satellites and a few paid informants to get the coordinates of the terrorist training camps in Afganistan.
Then bombarded the camps with cruise missiles. Make sure to put videos announce it was done in the media. A hundred mil worth of cruise missiles would have made some nice pretty explosions.
As Bush said, it would probably have hit a “$10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt”. But that’s ok. You can’t get all of the terrorists all of the time. More American died of “natural” causes the same day as 9/11 to make the death toll insignificant by evening.
So fire off a few cruise missiles. Bury the dead. Order replacements for the destroyed buildings. (I think they should have just replaced the missing buildings with near identical replacements with a little more structural reinforcement).
Maybe install better cockpit doors. As we found out recently, the better doors have killed at least 150 people. Maybe they caused thisand thiscrash as well. (with MH370, it’s just speculation, but it is possible that fumes only knocked out the pilots. This is based on the assumption that it was an electrical fire, which is why the transponders were turned off (it’s on the fire checklist), and the fact that the cabin has a lot more air volume than the cockpit, so passengers may have been conscious but trapped in the cabin for hours until their deaths)
Anyways, the increased airport security and the formation of Homeland Security were total wastes of money and have stopped exactly zero attacks. And, of course, the wars have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, albeit most of them Iraqis, and it turns out, if you bring freedom to the middle east, you give them the freedom to form into tribes and start freely killing each other like they have done for centuries…
*“2,000 Americans were killed by terrorists. We are and will always be the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now let’s get back to movies and football?”
That would be political suicide.
We could also deploy the National guard to the airports for a few weeks. Let everyone know they are there case the terrorists decide to storm the tarmac with AKs. Then put visible padlocks on all the cockpit doors.
Oh, and get started with a new sex scandal in the Oval office. Have some nude models make routine visits to talk about “women’s rights” in “private sessions” with the President. I bet people would forget about a missing building and a couple k dead in a month with that to distract them.
And it’s not obvious to me, which is why I’m asking why we should believe it.
Much of the 9/11 training and planning happened in the Philippines, Germany, Pakistan, and Florida. A lot happened in Afghanistan too, but is there some reason to think Afghanistan was special in that respect? My sense is that the best argument you can make is that known terrorists could hide from arrest there, and could therefore personally interact with not-yet-known terrorists. That seems pretty marginal, and even then, once you eliminate Afghanistan, they just go to Iraq. Or Yemen. Or the Pakistani frontier. Or Somalia. I don’t see that there was anything special about Afghanistan in terms of preventing future terrorism beyond the deterrence value of capturing those directly responsible (which strikes me as minimal).
AFAIK, since we invaded Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and affiliates have still had no problem planning and implementing mass casualty attacks. Or at least not problems related to their lack of safe haven in Afghanistan.
(Again, I could be wildly wrong. I’m coming from a perspective of skepticism and relative ignorance.)
I don’t think the situation was comparable. Black September didn’t have a safe haven like Al Qaeda did. This made it much easier for the Israelis to track them down. It would have been very difficult for the United States to conduct black ops in Afghanistan if the Taliban was still running the country.
It probably was political suicide for John Kerry.
Kerry made a statement about how the best response to terrorism would be to fight terrorism but also to get on with our lives. Parts of his statement were taken out of context to claim that Kerry wasn’t taking terrorism seriously.
I was fine with the war in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was holed up there, they were getting support or protection from the Taliban, and we needed to take them out. I’m completely 100% against going into Iraq though, and the whole Patriot Act thing
[QUOTE=Richard Parker]
Much of the 9/11 training and planning happened in the Philippines, Germany, Pakistan, and Florida.
[/QUOTE]
Not really, no. The cadre was trained in Afghanistan. They then did specific, vertical training in those other places. But having Afghanistan as a secure and safe base to operate out of was huge for them. Not having it for the last decade has been a huge blow to them.
They were supported by a nation state in that nation state. They had to operate covertly and circumspectly in those other places you named. It’s a big difference. And not only were they openly supported in Afghanistan, as I said they also had key members of their leadership ensconced in the Taliban Afghani government. I know this isn’t obvious to you why this is important and I’m not sure how to explain it since it’s so obvious to me why this was key.
They didn’t have to hide…that’s the point. They could and did operate openly and with the approval of the host government, which supported them not just by allowing them to operate openly but materially as well. They could train in the open, plan in the open, and were privy to assets and intelligence and information from the Taliban government itself, since they had people IN that government. In the other places you named, could the AQ cells have come out in the open and said who they were and what they were doing, expecting not only freedom to train and plan but also support from those other governments? I’m thinking not.
Certainly…and they HAVE done that. In fact, ObL was hiding in Pakistan. But that’s the key point…he was HIDING there. And how did that work out for him in the end? How has that worked out for cells in those other countries? They are in hiding and on the run, by and large, and what support they get is covert and circumspect. Which is why they are playing second fiddle to groups like ISIS/ISIL these days and trying to play catchup.
I disagree. I think that losing their bases in Afghanistan and their Taliban support has crippled them quite a bit. It hasn’t killed them…they are doing basically what you said, hiding out in other countries and carrying on. But they are pretty fragmented these days, and haven’t been able to do much in the way of really big ticket attacks, more lone wolf suicide bomber type stuff, or relying on local crazies to take up their brand and do something.