A cool Tuesday morning in September, Dunamis Flux Ross was working concrete with a handful of others in south Minneapolis. Suddenly, a woman from across the street ran out of her house to the group of working men. She cried out to them, asking if they had heard the news: a plane had struck the World Trade Center.
The woman welcomed all of them into her home and they surrounded her living room TV, watching in disbelief as the 9/11 attacks unfolded. “Amazed,” Ross said, looking back on how he felt that day. “Kind of disbelief. I went back to work and, at the end of the day, found out about the second plane.”
It is hard to believe that two decades have gone by since that defining moment in American history.
Richard Ellis, dean of the College of Education and Human Services at John Brown University, described the feeling this way: “On the one hand, we tend to think, ‘That was a bad thing that happened. I’m glad it’s over,’ but then in other moments we think — and it’s the same thing with COVID — that ‘the unthinkable can really happen.’ Things that are too awful to contemplate or things that have happened in other places but not here can happen here and do happen here.”
The anniversary of Sept. 11 hardly comes with relief or a sense of triumph. As U.S. forces pulled out of Afghanistan in August, the Taliban quickly rose to power. This caused Afghanistan’s president to flee and airports to be blocked to American citizens seeking escape. Some are still stranded in the country.
White House chief of staff Ron Klain said Sept. 5 on CNN’s “State of the Union” that there were around 100 American citizens left in Afghanistan, days after the administration’s Aug. 31 deadline for getting them all out.
“For Americans to gain a better understanding of what’s happening in Afghanistan today, context from the events of 20 years ago is key,” said Daniel Bennett, associate professor of political science at JBU.
“We were in Afghanistan because of 9/11,” he explained. “The debate has always really been: how do you leave? Or, if you don’t leave, are you prepared to stay forever? We do have soldiers in countries around the world, we have tens of thousands in Japan, tens of thousands in Germany. So, one option would be to maintain a small force in Afghanistan to support that government while waging a continuous guerilla war against these insurgents. But I think if the plan in Afghanistan had been always to get rid of Osama bin Laden, which they did just nine years later in Pakistan — if that was the goal — I am not sure what reason you need to stay in Afghanistan anymore unless you’re prepared to invest forever. That’s really where we’re at.”
Bennett also offered some words of encouragement for what may happen next with the Taliban. “I do think it might be in the Taliban’s best interest, given what they’ve gone through over the last 20 years, to not provide safe harbor for terrorist actors,” he said. “When Osama bin Laden was there, he was kind of there because no one would take him. After being kicked to the curb for the last 20 years, they know if another big attack happens that’s where the U.S. is going to turn its military energy. So, it’s possible the Taliban could say we don’t want to host regimes or terrorist ideologies. There’s already a big conflict brewing between the Taliban and a branch of ISIS in Afghanistan and so you see it’s complicated. It’s not just they’re Islamic extremists, there are branches of Islamic extremism that are going to fight with each other.”
It is a tricky political situation that no one wanted to be in, resulting in messy and complicated consequences. As Bennett also stated, “The short-term decisions have long term consequences.”