Twenty years after September 11, the United States is once again disrupting the world order

When the attacks of the Islamist network Al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people, the United States and the world with them, plunged into a “War on terrorism” which will dominate international relations for two decades, lastingly modifying the balance Middle East and masking the resurgence of Russia as a strategic rival and the emergence of China as the new number one opponent.

“Today, we have come to the end of a strategic cycle and have closed a parenthesis where international jihadism was the only identified enemy,” Elie Tenenbaum, co-author of the book “La guerre de twenty years”.

According to this researcher from the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), “the strategic competition between great powers is once again the international paradigm“, With” the emergence of other issues that relativize the terrorist threat “, starting with a clash with the air of a new cold war between Washington and Beijing.

And to show that the circle was finally closed, Joe biden wanted this twentieth anniversary to coincide with the total withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, invaded after the attacks of twin towers and to Pentagon track down al-Qaeda, who had perpetrated them, and expel them taliban, who had offered a sanctuary to the jihadist network.

But the symbol has turned against the President of the United States: on the eve of September 11, 2021, the Taliban control Kabul, thanks to a meteoric victory over the Afghan army that Washington boasted of having trained, financed and equipped .

If “the circle seems indeed closed”, it is unfortunately because this part of the world runs the risk of once again welcoming “very violent extremists”, lamented Mark Green, Republican lawmaker at the time of the attacks and today. hui president of the Wilson Center Research Institute.

The former head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is among those who think it would have been reasonable to leave the 2,500 American soldiers who were still there at the start of the year, to preserve both the income and the rights of women, once brutally punished by the Taliban.

For other reasons, strictly linked to the fight against terrorism, John bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN, is angry with successive US presidents.

Democrats Biden and Barack obama, but also the republican Donald trump, who was an ephemeral adviser to national security, were too eager, according to him, to please a public opinion tired of the “America’s Endless Wars”.

“Twenty years is a drop in the ocean!” Declared, with the provocative style that characterizes him, this sovereignist who has been defending North American interventionism for years.

“They did not explain why it is better to defend against the terrorist risk in Afghanistan than in the streets and the American sky.“He told AFP. For Bolton, the presence in Afghanistan was “an insurance policy against a new September 11, and it worked.”

Now, the return of the Taliban threatens to offer new sanctuaries to jihadism, he warned.

On the contrary, Trump, who was the first to speak of withdrawal, then Biden, but also much of the American political leadership, are betting that the rebirth of an Islamist regime in Kabul is not a vital threat to the United States, and that staying has a higher political cost than leaving.

The brutal departure from Afghanistan in any case revives the debate on the controversial legacy of these conflicts launched by the Americans thousands of kilometers from home in the name of sacrosanct “national security”.

“War on Terror” was the expression coined by the then president George W. Bush since the night of September 11, 2001.

That year 2001 ushered the world into the new millennium. All the more abruptly since a decade also ended, that of 1990, during which the United States acquired the somewhat misleading status of superpower.

For Andrew Bacevich, president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank that advocates restraint in foreign policy, this “ideological arrogance” and this “belief that American forces were invincible” had consequences.

They led Bush and his entourage “to see September 11 not only as an unforgivable slap in the face, but also as an opportunity to demonstrate, without a shadow of a doubt,” the so-called US superpower, he said.

Surrounded by neo-conservative interventionists determined to promote the democratic model throughout the planet, the Republican president proposed a very broad definition of his “war on terrorism”.

In January 2002, when the Taliban had been overthrown and al-Qaeda had already suffered greatly, Bush designated an “axis of evil” far removed from the initial target, consisting of Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Believing that it still benefited from the capital of global sympathy which had manifested itself during the attacks of September 11, its government embarked on a dangerous march towards the war in Iraq, accusing Saddam Hussein of having hidden weapons of destruction. massive.

But he was wrong: “Unanimity is crumbling very quickly” and “the image of the United States continues to collapse,” Tenenbaum stressed.

Ten years later, the departure of the Americans left a vacuum that favored the emergence of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) and his “caliphate” straddling Iraq and Syria. And the United States was forced to return, in 2014, to the head of an international military coalition.

The results of the war on terrorism are therefore mixed, to say the least.

More than 800,000 people have died, at a heavy price paid by Iraqi and Afghan civilians, at the cost of more than $ 6.4 trillion for the United States, according to a study published in late 2019 by Brown University.

There was no new 9/11, but ISIS’s spectacular attacks have left Europe mourning and the terrorist threat persist, although more diffuse and decentralized: there are today two or three times more jihadists in the world than in 2001, according to an estimate cited by Tenenbaum.

As for the image of the United States, it is tarnished. The use of torture, the opening of the prison of Guantánamo, in Cuba, to deprive the defendants of American constitutional protections, or the trivialization of “selective eliminations” by drones in foreign territory, have put the main world power out. rule of law. .

A certain consensus is emerging today: the war against terrorism has deviated from its initial objective.

Although this initially reduced the threat, the West failed “to manage the phase of stabilization of countries, causing political weariness in the face of these wars,” Tenenbaum said.

Even Bolton, who does not share the project of exporting democracy by force, lamented this desire to “build nations” at all costs rather than sticking to mere counterterrorism goals.