Bin Laden orchestrated the attacks and initially denied involvement but later recanted his false statements. The history, culture, and body of beliefs from which Bin Ladin shaped and spread his message are largely unknown to many Americans. Seizing on symbols of Islam's past greatness, he promised to restore pride to people who consider themselves the victims of successive foreign masters. He used cultural and religious allusions. He appealed to people disoriented by cyclonic change as they confront modernity and globalization. His rhetoric selectively drew from multiple resources as Islam, history, and the region's political and economic malaise. The most important failure was one of imagination; the leaders did not understand the gravity of the threat. The terrorist danger from Bin Ladin and al Qaeda was not a major topic for policy debate among the public. Before 9/11, the United States tried to solve the al Qaeda problemwith the capabilities it had used in the last stages of the ColdWar and its immediate aftermath. These capabilities were insufficient. Little was done to expand or reform them. The CIA had minimal capacity to conduct paramilitary operations with its own personnel, and it did not seek a large-scale expansion of these capabilities before 9/11. The CIA also needed to improve its capability to collect intelligence from human agents. Al Qaeda's new brand of terrorism presented challenges to U.S. governmental institutions that they were not well-designed to meet. Though the top officials understood the danger that there was uncertainty whether it was just a new and especially venomous version of the ordinary terrorist threat the United States had lived with for decades, or it was indeed radically new, posing a threat beyond any yet experienced. At no point before 9/11 was the Department of Defense fully engaged in themission of countering al Qaeda, even though this was perhaps the most dangerous foreign enemy threatening the United States. There were opportunities for intelligence and law enforcement to exploit al Qaeda's travel vulnerabilities. Since 9/11, the United States and its allies have killed or captured a majority of al Qaeda's leadership; toppled the Taliban, which gave al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan; and severely damaged the organization. Yet terrorist attacks continue. The enemy is not just "terrorism." It is the threat posed specifically by terrorism, by Bin Ladin and others who drew on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within a minority strain that does not distinguish politics from religion, and distorts both. The enemy is not Islam, the great world faith, but a perversion of Islam. The enemy goes beyond al Qaeda to include the radical ideological movement, inspired in part by al Qaeda that has spawned other terrorist groups and violence. Thus the strategy must match the means to two ends: dismantling the al Qaeda network and, in the long term, prevailing over the ideology that contributes to extremism and terrorism. The 9/11 story teaches the value of integrating strategic intelligence from all sources into joint operational planning with both dimensions spanning the foreign - domestic divide to prevail peace around.
Huma Kirmani An author, a TEDx speaker
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