Twenty-five years after the attacks on September 11, 2001, a former top United States diplomat has outlined what he feels were missteps made in the aftermath. In an interview on Friday with journalist Alex Marquardt for the Al Jazeera programme This is America, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad described how the country’s heightened sense of fear led to a series of spiralling decisions that would transform the world for years to come. The events of September 11 are considered the deadliest foreign attack in US history.
Nearly 3,000 people died when 19 hijackers crashed passenger jets into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Less than a month after the attacks, the US launched an invasion of Afghanistan, with the stated aim of attacking the group responsible, al-Qaeda. It was the start of a nearly 20-year-long war.
We were concerned that other attacks may be planned. There may be sleeper cells,” Khalilzad said. He later served in several ambassadorships, representing the US as the top diplomat in Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations at various points in his career.
In Friday’s interview, he described having misgivings about US policy toward Afghanistan, including the decision not to negotiate with the Taliban, which ruled the country at the time of the invasion. Reports have since emerged that the Taliban was willing to strike a deal with the US in 2001, in the early months of the war. But the US reportedly rejected the possibility of a deal.
The Taliban fought US-backed forces for the next two decades, until the US withdrawal in 2021. Since then, it has retaken power. The Bush administration justified that war by citing now-infamous intelligence assessments that Iraq was on the verge of obtaining “weapons of mass destruction”, including nuclear capabilities.
Those reports would later turn out to be false. Still, the war in Iraq would last more than eight years and would result in the overthrow and execution of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The US also feared another “surprise attack”, similar to what al-Qaeda had launched.
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