The remaining tower of the World Trade Center, Tower 2, dissolves in a cloud of dust and debris about a half hour after the first twin tower collapsed in New York on September 11, 2001. REUTERS See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google Friday, a quarter-century since the 9/11 attacks, marks an important milestone in our nation’s history.
It’s a fitting moment to take stock of the Global War on Terrorism, launched by President George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
First, the good news: There hasn’t been another major attack on the homeland since that terrible day.
Full credit here to America’s intelligence agencies and homeland-security professionals — the systems that they put in place in 2001 are holding their own.
And it’s a safe bet that, with the addition of artificial intelligence, those systems will only get stronger.
More good news: America has hunted down and eliminated all the top terrorists that hatched the plot to harm our country.
Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri are long gone — and few, if any, are rushing to take their places.
Credit relentless deterrence for the thinning ranks of these jihadist groups.
We may not have known it at the time, but our willingness to wage long wars made it clear that the price of attacking America is not worth paying.
True, the vestiges of groups like al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Taliban still linger today — but these groups are weaker and less inclined to risk an attack on the American homeland.
The Muslim Brotherhood — the ideological cornerstone of jihadism — is alive and well.
This well-funded network, operating worldwide, continues to radicalize Muslim youth from Europe to the Middle East to the heart of America.
President Donald Trump has named the Brotherhood as a threat, and his administration is taking meaningful steps to chip away at it, day by day.
In November Trump issued an historic and unprecedented executive order directing the Treasury and State departments to identify and sanction the overseas branches of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Several of those branches have already been hit with penalties that restrict their ability to fund-raise globally and do business in the United States — but there are many more to go.
It’s also critical to convince the governments of Qatar and Turkey to halt their support of this toxic network.
Both countries are allies of the United States; they must start acting like it.
The Iran-backed terrorist network also remains a problem — another one that the Trump administration has been tackling head-on.
The proxies of the Islamic Republic continue to pose a threat to the peaceful populations of the Middle East, not to mention US bases and American servicemen.
Groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq have undeniably weakened under Israeli military pressure, but the fight is not over.
Israel, a staunch partner in the war on terror, must be given the time and space to finish what it started.
And the US military must finish the job against their state sponsor, the head of the snake: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Interestingly, what’s frustrating Trump and the Israelis right now is what has frustrated the West for decades: These terrorist groups refuse to surrender.
They simply will not acknowledge defeat, even when they are beaten.
It’s this zealousness that continues to make victory elusive for America and its allies.
Jihadist ideology, a truly foreign concept, has never been easy for Americans to understand.
The hijacking of a monotheistic religion like Islam to rationalize violence and terror makes little sense to the Western mind.
Arguably, it was our failure to fully grasp the ideology of our enemy — and to respond appropriately — that stymied our ability to notch clear and unequivocal wins on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Twenty-five years on, the Global War on Terrorism may feel like a distant memory as other battles beckon.
Great power competition with China is likely to define American national security for decades to come; Russian wars on the edge of Europe may do the same.
But that doesn’t mean the asymmetric war against jihadists is over.
It will likely always require attention from our intelligence services on some level — and perhaps occasional deployments, too.
If recent past is prelude, we might expect stark warnings from neo-isolationists about getting dragged into “forever wars” when new ideological enemies emerge, particularly in the Middle East.
That’s both overly simplistic and a poor interpretation of history.
Yes, we must be judicious in all matters relating to war. Not every provocation is deserving of an American response.
But we also must remember that we have remained safe here at home for 25 years because we took the fight to our enemies — and we refused to let them take the fight to us.
Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the US Department of the Treasury, is executive director at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. X: @JSchanzer.
