Twenty-Five Years After 9/11: The New Face of Terror

Breakfast with Bwana

 By Anil Madan

On July 1, 2004, in response to a question on “Ask the White House” — an interactive forum for people to question members of the administration — Condoleeza Rice, then National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, and later his Secretary of State, assured a questioner that the US was safer in these words: “We are safer today. But we are not yet safe. One of the hardest aspects of homeland security is that the defender has to be right 100% of the time – while the terrorist only has to be right once.”

Three years earlier, on September 11, 2001, the terrorists had been right — not just once, but three times. Hijacked commercial airliners crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon. A fourth jet, perhaps destined to attack the Capitol, was instead brought down in a field in Pennsylvania by the heroism of passengers who refused to let the terrorist hijackers prevail.

The Brilliant Restaurant in Nairobi, Kenya, stood on Ngara Road, perched between Parklands and Pangani. It was atop a freestanding building and home to some of the most delectable Punjabi curries cooked by the Anand family. After Kenya’s independence, the family moved to England and reestablished the Brilliant in Southall.

Some fifteen years after the attacks of 9-11, my wife and I had dinner at the new Brilliant. As we were leaving, we noticed that the restaurant offered for sale its highly regarded and reputed pickles. We bought a half-dozen jars of assorted varieties to bring home to Boston. When we got to Heathrow Airport for the flight home, a security official asked my wife to open her bag and retrieving a jar of picked mangoes, said: “You cannot carry this on board. You’ll have to eat it or get rid of it.”

The young lady happened to be of Indian descent and my wife thinking that she would understand, said: “But it’s just mango pickle. What harm can it do?” The security official shrugged and said: “Rules, madam, it’s too big to carry. Sorry.”

The mango pickle was left behind at Heathrow. That little story tells the tale of part of the legacy of 9-11. The world is in a pickle and will remain so even though we are fairly sure that Al Qaeda, the terrorist organisation founded and nurtured by Osama bin Laden, and its offshoots have been eliminated.

Security checks at airports around the world are now de rigueur. They were the most immediate and tangible effect of the response to the terrorist attacks, experienced directly by Americans and people across the globe. Over the years, security checks have added extra hours to travellers’ journeys, remain a constant annoyance and inconvenience, and have spawned an infrastructure of security scanners, x-ray machines, conveyer belts, and airport trays, not to mention billions of dollars of expense for the government agencies charged with surveillance and inspection.

The attacks on US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 killing some 224 persons and wounding 4,000, and the attack of 2000 on the USS Cole while it was docked at the port in Aden, were also acts of Al Qaeda.

Within ten days after 9-11, President Bush declared a war on terror and noted: “Our nation has been put on notice:  We are not immune from attack.” He added: “Freedom and fear are at war.” This was a declaration of not just a nation at war with some other entity, but a concept of freedom against an an extremist ideology.

The US did not stand alone.  America’s NATO allies, for the first time ever, rallied under Article 5 of the NATO charter — an attack on one member is deemed an attack on all. But it is important to recognize that the US and its allies received no support from China, Russia, Iran, and the Middle East countries generally. To be sure, Russian President Vladimir Putin presented a sculpture to the United States to serve as a memorial in the fight against terror.

The attacks of 9-11 led to the US war on Iraq based on lies about a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. President Bush had also demanded that Afghanistan close the Al Qaeda facilities in its territory and deliver the leaders of Al Qaeda hiding in Afghanistan. When the Taliban ignored the demands, the stage was set for the war in Afghanistan.

In due course, Saddam Hussein became a victim of the US response to 9-11. Subsequently, Osama bin Laden was captured and killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He was given an unceremonious burial at sea.  President Obama declared: “Justice has been done.” Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama’s successor was killed by a US drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan.

During Trump’s first term as President, the leader of ISIS, the successor organisation to Al Qaeda, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was located at a hideout in Idlib Province, Syria. US military dogs chased him into a tunnel where he exploded a suicide vest. President Trump declared: ““The world is now a safer place.”

A caution is in order.

Many commentators declare the war on terror is over. To be sure, Al Qaeda seems to have gone out of existence and ISIS which replaced it is a shell. However, declaring a definitive conclusion to these security challenges would be premature. The notion, expressed by Condoleeza Rice that the defender has to be right 100% of the time underscores the ongoing challenge of counter-terrorism.

Today, with Iran frequently cited by Western policymakers as a leading state sponsor of terrorism, security analysts argue that the conflict has evolved rather than concluded. Iran has attacked its neighbouring Arab nations: Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Its Houthi proxies have attacked Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and, of course, Israel. A new dimension to the war on terror has emerged.

From the perspective of Israel and the United States, the rhetoric of Iran’s Supreme Leader and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — specifically calls for “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” — cannot be dismissed as mere posture. Similarly, several Gulf states that have previously experienced Iranian-backed strikes view Tehran’s theocratic regime as an ongoing threat to regional infrastructure and economic stability.

It pays to remember that Terror does not sleep.

Cheerz…
Bwana

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 11 September 2026