Clifford D. May
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed the lives of many Americans, mine among them. Enlisting in the military wasn’t an option, but I was given the chance to set up a research institution on terrorism and other threats to free peoples. Twenty years ago, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies was established.
Prior to 9/11, influential voices in the foreign policy community argued that terrorism was not a serious national security threat, merely the weapon of the weak, a way for those without fighter jets and tanks to call attention to their “legitimate grievances.”
After 9/11, I thought that debate would end. I also thought it had become obvious that “grievances, legitimate or not, provide no license for the murder of other people’s children” — a moral insight conveyed to me by the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, an eminent foreign policy scholar and the first woman to serve as America’s ambassador to the U.N.
My optimism turned out to be unjustified. To this day, there are those — U.N. officials emphatically included — who condone terrorism for causes they favor, euphemizing it as “resistance.”
And I certainly never expected that the United States, having removed the Taliban from power in the autumn of 2001, would usher that al Qaeda-aligned terrorist organization back into power.
Perhaps President Biden didn’t understand that his withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan would bring that result. “The likelihood of the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is very unlikely,” he said as the American retreat was facilitating the Taliban’s advance.
“There’s going to be no circumstances where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States in Afghanistan,” he insisted not long before that happened.
“The mission hasn’t failed — yet,” he told reporters as throngs of desperate Afghans crowded into and around Kabul International Airport, some clinging to departing aircraft and three falling to their deaths.
On Aug. 26, a terrorist near the airport perimeter detonated explosives, killing more than 170 people, including 13 U.S. service members. By Aug. 30, the bug-out was complete.
Last week, a report from Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee members led by Rep. Michael McCaul revealed that at least 800 Americans were left behind. Thousands of American-trained Afghan military personnel, including elite commandos, fled to Iran, where we must assume they spilled their guts — figuratively if not literally — to the regime’s Ministry of Intelligence.
The White House furiously countered that the report “advocates for endless war,” and “ignores the impacts of the flawed deal that former President Donald Trump struck with the Taliban” in 2020.
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