Twenty-five years after 9/11—XI Who won the “...

Summary

• It counted roughly 900,000 direct war deaths in its 2021 assessment and more than 38 million people displaced across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and the Philippines.
• Traffickers did not need to win a war.
• Brown University, Costs of War, “Costs of the 20-year war on terror: US$8 trillion and 900,000 deaths”, September 1, 2021; Costs of War, “Civilians killed and displaced”; Stephanie Savell, How Death Outlives War, 2023.

AI Generated Summary

Who won the “War on Terror”? Not the families who buried their children in New York, Kabul, Baghdad, Peshawar or Hangu. Not the soldiers and police officers sent repeatedly to hold ground that politics, justice and development failed to secure. Not the refugees who carried the ruins of policy across borders. A war announced without a measurable end produced many beneficiaries, several tactical victors and no defensible winner.¹

The question must nevertheless be answered. Power escapes accountability when every failure is renamed sacrifice and every new threat becomes proof that the previous campaign must continue. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the proper balance sheet is not territory temporarily captured or commanders killed. It is whether terrorism declined, constitutional government strengthened, illicit finance contracted and ordinary people became safer. By those measures, the proclaimed war failed.

Osama bin Laden did not achieve his declared political programme. Al-Qaeda’s central leadership was hunted, fragmented and deprived of much of its capacity to direct spectacular attacks. Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad. His organisation did not unite Muslim societies behind its ideology; its violence repelled millions. It would, therefore, be wrong to declare him the victor.

Nelly Lahoud’s phrase “catastrophic success” is more exact. Bin Laden succeeded in provoking an overreaction vastly larger than al-Qaeda’s own strength. The United States invaded Afghanistan, diverted itself into Iraq, normalised indefinite detention and surveillance, spent fortunes on distant wars and helped turn local conflicts into recruiting grounds. His success was catastrophic because it multiplied suffering, including among the very Muslims he claimed to defend.²

The scale of that overreaction is no longer rhetorical. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimated US commitments of about US$8 trillion for post-9/11 wars through fiscal year 2022, including future veterans’ care. It counted roughly 900,000 direct war deaths in its 2021 assessment and more than 38 million people displaced across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and the Philippines. Later research estimated millions more indirect deaths from the destruction of health systems, livelihoods and infrastructure.³

If expenditure disclosed purpose, the clearest winners sat far from the battlefield. Pentagon spending exceeded US$14 trillion between 2001 and 2020, with between one-third and one-half going to military contractors. From 2020 to 2024 alone, private firms received US$2.4 trillion—54 per cent of discretionary Pentagon spending. Five corporations obtained US$771 billion in contracts. War was failure for strategy and a dependable business model for those paid to supply it.⁴

This does not prove that 9/11 was engineered to enrich contractors, nor is such a conspiracy needed. Institutions reveal their real priorities through the interests they continue to reward after stated objectives recede. Threat inflation protected budgets. Secrecy obstructed scrutiny.

The revolving door joined public command to private gain. “Uncle Sam” could declare democracy, women’s rights and counter-narcotics as goals while allocating the overwhelming weight of resources to coercion and outsourced war.