9/11 unleashed two decades of war. Now Putin is exploiting the damage

It’s unlikely that Osama bin Laden picked up the idea of a clash of civilizations from a Harvard professor’s essay in a 1993 edition of Foreign Affairs, but when Al Qaeda terrorists slammed two aircraft into New York’s Twin Towers and attacked the Pentagon eight minutes later - that’s what he got. The conflicts between cultures and religions that would replace the Cold War, as Prof Samuel Huntingdon predicted, have defined the last two decades and will dominate the world for the rest of this century. Ironically, this new chapter in history started as a war between east and west in the form of Islam vs the Christian world.

But now, the West is again under attack from a Cold War enemy that watched the US and its allies waste lakes of blood and trillions in treasure enfeebling themselves after 9/11. In the immediate aftermath, cooler heads in Washington might have been able to more deliberately and surgically exact revenge for the murder of 2,977 people on that day when, live on television, the world watched in horror as the towers came down. Amid an act of war that turned out to have been launched, not by a state, but a fanatical group of mostly Saudi extremists led by the scion of a billionaire family hiding in Afghanistan, President George W Bush reacted as Osama bin Laden would have hoped.

The pain and the outrage, the fear and the amazement that the heart of the US government had been the target of mass murder, were so visceral that the US president invoked article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s charter for the first, and so far, only time in history. An attack on one Nato nation was met by almost all the others, plus additional allies, joining a war to wipe out al Qaeda and topple the Taliban, Afghanistan’s ruling deeply conservative Islamists. The Taliban had no interest in global terror then.

They have none today either. But they had given bin Laden a safe haven for his plot against America and were guilty by association at least, if not actual accomplices. By the end of that year, the Taliban had been felled.

Bin Laden had been seen fleeing the caves of Tora Bora close to the borders with Pakistan, and a new military doctrine was being used by America and its allies. This allowed for the killing of members of terrorist organizations in pre-emptive attacks. They didn’t need to be ticking bombs; they just had to be part of a movement that made them.

The massive reaction of the US and its allies to 9/11 created a new world disorder. Pre-emptive strikes were launched in Pakistan and elsewhere. Many civilians died in extrajudicial executions under the new doctrine.